
Class, 
Book. 



PRi:SKNT)^L) 15Y 



/ 



DIVINE PERSONALITY 
AND HUMAN LIFE 

BEING THE GIFFORD LECTURES 

DELIVERED IN THE UNIVERSITY OF 

\ ABERDEEN IN THE YEARS 1 9 1 8 & 1 9 1 9 

SECOND COURSE 



% 



BY 

CLEMENT C. J. WEBB 

Fellozv of St. Mary Magdalen College^ Oxford 



ABERDEEN 

FOR THE UNIVERSITY 

1920 



Aberdeen 

University 

Studies 

No. 80 




I ITU 



DIVINE PERSONALITY 
AND HUMAN LIFE 



University of Aberdeen. 

UNIVERSITY STUDIES. 
General Editor : P. J. Anderson, LL.B., Librarian to the University. 

1900-1913. Nos. 1-63. 

1914. No. 64. — Zoological Studies. Professor Thomson and others. Ser. VIII. 
No. 65.— Highland Host of 1678. J. R. Elder, D.Litt. 

No. 66. — Concise Bibliography of Aberdeen, Banff, and Kincardine. J. F, Kellas Johnstone, 
„ No. 67. — Bishop Burnet as Educationist. John Clarke, M.A. 

1915. No. 6^.— Territorial Soldiering in N.E. Scotland. J. M. Bulloch, M.A. 

„ No. 69. — Proceedings of the Anatomical and Anthropological Society, 1908-14. 

„ No. 70.— Zoological Studies. Professor Thomson and others. Ser. IX. 

„ No. 71. — Aberdeen University Library Bulletin. Vol. II. 

1916. No. 72. — Physiological Studies. Professor MacWilliam, F.R.S,, and others. Ser. I. 

1917. No. 73. — Concise Bibliography of Inverness-shire. P. J. Anderson. 

„ No. 74. — The Idea ofJGod. Professor Pringle-Pattison. (Gifford Lectures, 1912-13.) 

„ No 75. — Interamna Borealis. W. Keith Leask, M.A. 

„ No. 76. — Roll of Medical Service of British Army. Col. W. Johnston, C.B., LL.D. 

1918. No. yj.— Aberdeen University Library Bulletin. Vol. III. 

„ No. 7%.— Moral Values and the Idea of God. W. R. Sorley, Litt.D. (Gifford Lect., 1914-15. 
igig. No. 79.— God! and Personality. C. C. J. Webb, M.A. (Gifford Lect., 1918.) 
1920. No. %Q.— Divine Personality and Human Life. C. C. J. Webb. (Gifford Lect., igig.) 



DIVINE PERSONALITY 
AND HUMAN LIFE 

BEING THE GIFFORD LECTURES 
DELIVERED IN THE UNIVERSITY OF 
ABERDEEN IN THE YEARS 1 9 1 8 & 1 91 9 

SECOND COURSE 



BY 



CLEMENT C. J. WEBB 

Fellow of St, Mary Magdalen College^ Oxfird 



ABERDEEN 

FOR THE UNIVERSITY 

1920 



■mtt 



■\o,Z-- 



\ 1?I^ARY OF 50f^G??ESS [• 



■^4 






Dedicated to 

CHARLES JOHN SHEBBEARE 

IN THE Fortieth Year 

OF OUR Friendship 



PREFACE 

In publishing the second series of these Lectures I have 
to repeat, in respect of it, the expression, already prefixed 
to the first series, of my gratitude to the Senatus Academi- 
cus of the University of Aberdeen for the invitation to 
deliver them, to my own College in Oxford for leave of 
absence in order to avail myself of that invitation, and 
to my wife for her aid in preparing them for delivery and 
for publication. I am also, in regard to both series, 
greatly indebted to the kindness both of the Editor of 
the Library of Philosophy and of Professor Loveday 
aUke in correcting the proofs and in suggesting improve- 
ments in the text. 

The present volume, unlike its predecessor, does not 
contain in its notes any reference to the name of the friend 
to whom I have dedicated it. But my obligations to 
one with whom I have, since we were both schoolboys, 
constantly enjoyed the fullest and most intimate dis- 
cussion of all the matters that have most concerned 
both or either of us, and especially of the great topics of 
Religion and Philosophy, are not to be measured by 
the number of such explicit references, and I am scarcely 
less conscious of them where our agreement is least 
than where it is closest. 

September 19 19. 



SYLLABUS 



LECTURE I 

PAGE 

The Subject Introduced . . . . . • ^7 

According to the conclusions reached in the preceding 
course of lectures, by the expression a ' Personal God ' 
is meant a God with whom his worshippers may enjoy 
a personal intercourse. An emotion not well des- 
cribable except in terms suggestive of such intercourse 
is associated with the higher forms of Religious Ex- 
perience, even where there is no such explicit assertion 
of Personality in God as is made by Christianity alone 
among the great historic religions, and by Christianity 
only in connexion with a doctrine which denies God to 
be a single Person. This doctrine is found to avoid 
certain difficulties frequently felt to beset the doctrine 
of the Personality of God. 

In the second course of lectures we are to examine 
Personality in Man in the light of these conclusions, 
and to discuss their bearing upon the problem of the 
' value and destiny ' of finite individual persons. An 
apology is ofiered for neglect — due to the lecturer's 
incompetence in them — of certain subjects relevant to 
these inquiries, namely Physiology, Psychology, and 
' Psychical Research.' But attention is called to the 
fact that many of the processes which make up the 
psychical life of human beings seem to be carried on 
' below the threshold of consciousness ' ; and an 
attempt is made to arrive at some understanding of what 
is meant by this and similar phrases. While it is ob- 
served that it would be hard to concei^'e of Personality 
under our conditions of time and space without such 
a ' subliminal region ' of psychical life, the opposite 

9 



10 SYLLABUS 

may be said of the Divine Personality whereof (as was 
contended in the former course of lectures) we have 
experience in Religion. The task of the lectures im- 
mediately following will be that of investigating the 
manner in which a recognition of such Personality in 
God will affect our view of the various spheres of 
activity in which Human Personality is found to manifest 
itself. 



LECTURE II 

Divine Personality and the Economic Life ... 45 

The greater part of waking human life is devoted to 
what may be called an ' economic ' activity, intended 
to secure the satisfaction of the appetites which serve 
for the maintenance of the individual and the continu- 
ance of the species. This activity, involving as it does 
the use of Reason, must be reckoned, along with the 
higher activities, scientific, aesthetic, moral, political, 
and religious, as an expression of Personality. These 
higher activities indeed first appear in its service, although 
it is perhaps not possible to find a stage of human devel- 
opment in which none of them is associated with it. 
Between the economic and the religious interest in human 
life there exists an obvious antagonism ; yet the economic 
activity is the indispensable basis of the religious as of 
all the other higher activities. The religious and ethical 
activities more conspicuously exhibit this double relation, 
at once positive and negative, to the economic ; and in this 
as in other respects the political activity is closely akin to 
the ethical. In the case of the scientific activity, and even 
more in that of the aesthetic, the negative relation is not 
so prominent, but it is notwithstanding present in these 
also. The man in whose life the economic activity 
greatly predominates is apt to feel a religion which 
emphasizes its negative relation to the economic life to be 
hostile to his interests ; but he often has himself a religion, 
though one which minimizes this negative relation . Such a 
Religion (which will usually be vaguely anthropomorphic, 
thereby pointing forward to a doctrine of Divine Person- 
ality), though common as a state of mind in indi- 
viduals, does not easily assume the form of a religious 
institution. 



SYLLABUS 11 



LECTURE III 

PAGE 

Divine Personality and the Scientific Life . . 68 

The scientific activity has two chief products : Science 
in the narrower sense of the word, and Philosophy. As 
was pointed out in the first lecture of the previous 
course, in Science Personahty seems to be of Uttle account ; 
for, though it is a condition of the existence of Science, 
it is omitted from the account which Science gives of its 
conclusions. We can thus explain as due to the necessary 
limitations of Science the appearance of irrelevance to 
the scientific view of the world attaching to the thought 
of Divine Personality ; while, if we start from that thought 
itself, we may find in that scientific view a means of 
purifying and enriching the very conception which it 
seems to reject. Philosophy, although unlike Science 
it deals with the Subject as well as with Objects, 
with Individuals as well as with Universals, is often 
supposed to incline its students towards Pantheism 
and so towards the rejection of Divine Personality. But 
a consideration of the mutual relations of Philosophy 
and Religion already discussed in the preceding course 
will at once reveal the ground of this supposition in the fact 
that, in differentiating itself from Religion, Philosophy 
maintains a purely cognitive attitude to the supreme 
Reality, while Religion is always an experience of God 
as in direct relation to our whole individual personality. 
At the same time Philosophy cannot, without prejudice 
to its business of contemplating Reality as a whole, 
omit from its survey the religious experience which is 
consummated in the worshipper's enjoyment of personal 
intercourse with his God. 



LECTURE IV 

Divine Personality and the Esthetic Life . . 90 

One might expect to find that the conception of Divine 
Personality, to which it is often thought easier to attribute 
an imaginative than a scientific value, would make an 
especial appeal to the artist ; but in fact this is fre- 
quently not so. The explanation of this is that the artist 
is apt to represent to himself the personal God of religion 
as a tyrannical power, denying its rights to the impulse of 



12 SYLLABUS 

self-expression, which is his very life : in fact as the 
" Urizen " of Blake's mythology. The work of Blake is 
especially worthy of study in this connexion as that of 
one who is both a great artist and a great religious 
mystic. In his bold anthropomorphism, in his hatred of 
the " Natural Religion " of the eighteenth century on 
account of its pre-occupation with the notion of a 
" Moral Governor," in the tendency to polytheism which 
is characteristic of him as of poets generally, and in his 
reiterated denial of a God who is more than human, we 
see illustrated both the attraction and the repulsion 
which the notion of Divine Personality exercises upon 
the artistic temperament. 

A doctrine of Divine Personality which, like that 
advocated in these Lectures, insists on the immanence 
as no less important than the transcendence of God, 
may welcome such protests as Blake's against a view 
which would lay disproportionate stress on divine 
transcendence and in connexion with this dispropor- 
tionate stress would tend to identify Religion with 
Morality. At the same time we find that with Blake, 
as with Signer Croce, a one-sided emphasis upon divine 
immanence prevents him from doing justice to the ele- 
ment in religious experience which is expressed theoreti- 
cally by the af&rmation of God's transcendence, and 
emotionally by the sentiment of humble adoration. 



LECTURE V 

Divine Personality and the Moral Life . . .113 

The conception of a moral legislator and judge of the 
world, which is apt to repel the artist, has often been 
felt on the other hand to be congenial to the temper of 
the moralist ; and atheism, understood as the rejection 
of the belief in such a God, has been frequently supposed 
to imply or promote immorality of life. 

Notwithstanding the present unpopularity of the 
latter view, which, as is rightly felt, may be easily exploited 
in the interests of bigotry and injustice, it contains a 
kernel of truth in that the representation of moral laws as 
divine commands, which is cautiously approved even 
by Kant, is perhaps the representation of them which 
sets the fact of obligation in the most intelligible light. By 
the help of an examination of Kant's concepts of " auto- 



SYLLABUS 13 

PACE 

nomy," and of the " Kingdom (or rather Empire) of 
Ends," as well as of Martineau's doctrine of the revela- 
tion of a Personal God in conscience, we reach the 
conclusion that the notion of Divine Personality throws 
a light upon the nature of the fundamental moral 
experience, the consciousness of obligation, which no 
other conception of the ultimate Reality can afford. 



LECTURE VI 

Divine Personality and the Political Life . . .145 

Our discussion of the relation of the conception of Divine 
Personality to the political activity of the human spirit 
takes the form of an examination of the corporate person- 
ality often attributed to certain communities and especi- 
ally to the State. This attribution is not to be regarded as 
a mere metaphor or as a legal fiction ; yet the Personality 
which can be rightly ascribed to a community is not 
Personality in its full and proper sense. It may be, 
however, suggested that the attribution of Personality to . 
God is of the same kind ; and certain facts in the history 
of Religion may be alleged in support of this suggestion. 
But it is found that the conception of corporate Person- 
ality, so far from leading us to deny Personality in 
a more proper sense to God, points in the contrary 
direction. The primitive deification of the spirit of the 
community may be recognized as the dim consciousness 
that the unity of the common spiritual life of men is to 
be sought in a Supreme Being who manifests in conscious 
personal intercourse the full reality of spiritual existence. 



LECTURE VII 

Divine Personality and the Religious Life . .172 

The representation of God as One with whom personal 
intercourse is possible can be harmonized with the 
experience proper to the economic, scientific, aesthetic, 
ethical and social activities of the human spirit ; but 
the true ground of this representation is to be sought 
in Religious Experience. By means of an examination of 
Dr. Rashdall's criticism of the claim to an " immediate " 
knowledge of God or even of other persons, the conclusion 



14 SYLLABUS 

FAOE 

is reached that there is no inconsistency in holding that 
the experience whether of social intercourse or of per- 
sonal religion is inexplicable apart from the admission of 
such immediacy, and also recognizing the part played in 
these forms of experience by ' inference ' or ' intellec- 
tual construction.' The Lecture ends with a considera- 
tion of the objection to a doctrine of Divine Personality 
founded on the inadequacy to religious experience of 
the notion of Personality as applied to human beings. 
It is contended that, while no doubt a " supplementation " 
of this notion will be required, this must not be such as 
to eliminate from religious experience the possibility of 
a reciprocity in lov^e between God and his worshipper. 



LECTURE VIII 

Naturalism and the Value of the Individual Person . 196 

The importance of Personality is depreciated from two 
contrasted points of view ; from that of Naturalism 
and that of Absolute Idealism. By Naturalism is meant 
a way of thinking which identifies the ' philosophical ' 
with the ' scientific ' attitude of mind, and is thus, 
since the latter is conversant with ' Universals ' only, 
disabled from grasping the Individual, and therefore 
the Person. But the depreciation of Personality by 
Naturalism is not merely due to this inability to take 
account of the Individual. It is due also to the necessity 
which it is under of regarding Personality as Natural 
Science must regard it, from the outside only, as a mode 
of behaviour of certain natural objects. Yet the very 
existence of Natural Science presupposes Personality, 
though, as essentially an apprehension of objects, it 
cannot come face to face with the subject whose activity 
itself is. There will always be something paradoxical 
in the association of an intelligence which takes the 
whole world for its object with material bodies of such 
seeming insignificance in that world as those of human 
beings ; nor does the philosophy of Spinoza succeed in 
removing the difficulty which this association presents. 
It may however suggest the possibility of an argument 
which may be brought in support of the depreciation of 
Personality by Naturalism against the contention that 
Natural Science itself is only conceivable as the activity 
of a personal Mind : namely, that Personality in its 
turn presupposes Reason, which transcends the dis- 



SYLLABUS 15 

PACE 

tinction of persons. The recent attempts by Pragmatism 
and Personal Idealism to give to the personal principle of 
unity in our experience a priority over the rational, seem 
on examination to be unsuccessful ; and the presumption 
thus raised in favour of allowing on the other hand a 
priority to the rational over the personal principle is 
on the whole confirmed by a consideration of the pheno- 
mena of what is called ' multiple personality.' Never- 
theless we are not hereby enabled to conceive Reason 
except as exercised by an individual and, in virtue of this 
exercise of Reason, a personal mind. Yet not only the 
facts of extreme and pathological ' dissociation ' but 
many phenomena of everyday life, and in particular those 
of moral struggle, reveal the unity of human Personality 
as an achievement, though an achievement which would 
be impossible apart from a principle of unity which is 
operative from the very beginning of personal life, yet 
cannot be identified with the unity of the bodily organism. 

LECTURE IX 

Absolute Idealism and the Value of the Individual 

Person 228 

The idealistic depreciation of Personality turns upon 
the thought that, though a higher form of Individuality 
than some with which we are acquainted, it is yet an 
imperfect form, and is shown to be such by the fact 
that a person is essentially a member of a society. It 
is not indeed to be questioned that the individuality of 
Persons is not that which can be affirmed of the Absolute 
alone. But this does not dispose of the problem of the 
peculiar value of Personality as the only form in which, 
within our experience. Mind or Spirit is manifested as 
concrete reality. It is suggested that we need a whole- 
hearted recognition at once of the genuine unity of the 
object of Reason and also of the unity of each personal 
subject as a substantial element in the system of Reality 
and not merely an adjective qualifying it. The con- 
tention that finite Personality is merely * adjectival ' 
is closely bound up in the thought of those who maintain 
it with insistence upon the ethical principle of self- 
realization by means of self-surrender. The discussion 
of the bearing of this principle upon the question of the 
value of the individual Personality will lead us on to 
that of its destiny. 



PAGS 



16 SYLLABUS 

LECTURE X 

The Destiny of the Individual Person .... 250 

We are here concerned with the doctrine of a personal 
Hfe after death, but only so far as it is inferred from a 
certain theory of the nature or structure of Reality. 
The history of the modern European belief in Immor- 
tality may be traced back to two main sources : the 
religion of Israel after the exile and the philosophy of 
Plato. In both of these, the doctrine of Immortality 
was no mere survival or even refined interpretation of 
beliefs associated everywhere with primitive animism, 
but represented a new departure, the starting-point of 
which is the individual person's relation to the Eternal, 
and the value to be attributed to him in consequence 
thereof. It thus depends in either case on a certain view 
of the nature of Reality as revealed in a religious experi- 
ence. Serious difficulties may be raised against this 
doctrine, some of the chief among which are briefly con- 
sidered ; and it is concluded that, while none of these are 
sufficient to put out of court the considerations based 
upon religious experience, it is also impossible in the face 
of them to make out a plausible case on other grounds 
for any such doctrine either of the ' immortality of the 
soul ' or of the ' resurrection of the body.' But this 
very impossibility may be shown to be what might be 
expected from the point of view of the religious experience 
itself ; for an assurance of a future life drawn from 
grounds belonging to another region of experience would 
lack the religious value of an assurance whose sole 
foundation is faith in the personal Love revealed in the 
religious experience the vindication whereof has been 
the main topic of these Lectures. 

INDEX 289 



DIVINE PERSONALITY 
AND HUMAN LIFE 

LECTURE I 

THE SUBJECT INTRODUCED 

In the course of Lectures which I had the honour of 
delivering in the University of Aberdeen in the year 
1918, and which have since been pubhshed under the 
title God and Personality, I endeavoured to commend to 
my hearers certain conclusions of which I will venture 
now to remind the readers of my former volume, by way 
of introduction to what I am to offer to their considera- 
tion in the present course. 

When we set ourselves to discover what is meant 
by a ' personal God ' in the minds of those who lay 
stress upon the importance of this conception of the 
object of Religion, we found that it is a God with 
whom a personal relationship is possible for his wor- 
shippers. We observed that an emotion towards the 
Supreme ReaUty, of a kind which is not easily describable 
except in terms similar to those used of an emotion felt 
towards a person, is associated with the higher forms of 
rehgious experience, even where there is no explicit 
assertion of PersonaHty in God by the authoritative form- 

2 IT 



18 DIVINE PERSONALITY 

ularies of the religion in question. Indeed, as was pointed 
out, such an expKcit assertion is in fact made by the 
authoritative formularies of Christianity alone among the 
great historic religions of mankind. And in these formu- 
laries, as received by the great majority of Christians, 
Personality in God was, as I went on to show, associated 
with the doctrine that God was not a single Person. By 
this doctrine certain peculiar difficulties were avoided 
which have been felt to attach to the doctrine of the 
Personality of God often professed by individuals in recent 
times. These difficulties arose from the obviously social 
reference of the word * personality ' as used of human 
beings, a reference which has often been held to unfit 
it for application to the Supreme Reality, since this 
must, it is thought, be regarded, if not as all-inclusive, 
at least as not in its very essence correlative with beings 
merely finite. Now according to the Christian doctrine 
personal relations are conceived as constituting the inner 
life of the Supreme Reality, and the intercourse of the 
worshipper with God as a participation in this life, much 
as philosophers have frequently conceived human thought 
and knowledge as a participation in the eternal activity 
of the Divine Mind. It was not pretended that such a 
position was free from difficulties of its own any more 
than is the philosophical idealism with which I have 
just compared it. But it was contended, and an attempt 
was made to confirm the contention by a detailed con- 
sideration of some well-known problems of philosophical 
theology, that a conception of Divine Personality on Unas 
suggested by the Christian doctrine to which I have 
referred was able to afford us more assistance towards 
a solution of these problems than any theory which could 
be put into competition with it ; and moreover that the 



THE SUBJECT INTRODUCED 19 

doctrine in question was entitled to be considered as the 
most fully articulated expression of a religious experience 
by no means peculiar to the one reHgion which has definite- 
ly chosen to employ the expression * Personality ' in its 
account of God, nor even to those which might, in the 
more general sense of the phrase, as now commonly 
employed, be described as religions with a * Personal 
God/ 

In the sequel we are to examine Personality in man 
in the light of these conclusions. In the first Lecture 
of my first course I gave reasons which might justify 
us in postponing this examination to that of the concep- 
tion of Personality in God. These reasons were both 
historical and philosophical. The historical reason was 
the priority of theological discussion in the development 
of the thought of Personality ; the philosophical reason 
was the fact that Personality is itself an ideal which 
may best be studied at the outset apart from conditions 
which in our experience of finite persons limit its full 
realization ; and therefore in the notion which, under the 
inspiration of religious experience, men had been led to 
form of Personality as it may be held to exist in God. 
But now we may turn to the consideration of finite Per- 
sonality, and in the first place to the mutual bearing of 
such conclusions as have been already reached and the 
facts of man's nature as exhibited in the several different 
spheres of his distinctively human, that is, of his personal 
activity. After this we shall go on to discuss the * value 
and destiny ' (to use a convenient phrase borrowed from 
the title of the second series of Mr. Bosanquet's Gifford 
Lectures) of the individual human person, in the light 
of these same conclusions. 

Here we shall find ourselves confronted with a tendency 



20 DIVINE PERSONALITY 

characteristic of contemporary thought, under influences 
arising from two opposite quarters, those of NaturaHsm 
and of Absolute Ideahsm respectively, to insist upon the 
comparatively very subordinate value of the finite indi- 
vidual and to advocate, as the reasonable result of a 
conviction that the personal life of the finite individual 
possesses only such a very subordinate value, a resolute 
acquiescence in its transiency in fact. This will bring 
us to consider on the other hand the ancient and wide- 
spread belief in the immortality of the finite individual, 
with a view to discovering what light can be thrown 
on this tendency and on this belief by a Natural Theology 
based, as we saw that Natural Theology should be based, 
upon the highest available religious experience of man- 
kind. 

There are certain subjects of which it would be natural 
to expect to look for a discussion in an examination of 
the problems of human Personality, but in respect of which 
I occupy the room of the unlearned, so that I have little 
or nothing to say about them that would be worthy of 
your attention. From a Gilford Lecturer his hearers 
and readers have the right to expect the results of first- 
hand study and reflection, and it would be out of place 
for me to offer to them the mere gleanings of my desultory 
reading in fields where I myself am wholly destitute of 
the training and experience which would enable me to 
move with the assurance that only a thorough knowledge 
of the ground can give. While I shall not hesitate to 
describe, for what it is worth, the general impression made 
upon me by what I have gathered concerning these 
matters from my inspection of others' accounts, so far as 
it has affected my general view of my main topic, I shall 
do no more than this ; but it must not be supposed from 



THE SUBJECT INTRODUCED 21 

the inevitable superficiality of such a treatment that I 
underrate the importance to the understanding of human 
Personality of investigations with which I pretend to no 
more than a very slight acquaintance. 

The first of these subjects is the Physiology of the 
brain and nervous system. I greatly deplore but I cannot 
now repair the defect in my education which has left me 
in regard to this, as in regard to all other departments of 
Natural Science, no better than an ignoramus. 

Plainly any examination of the nature of human Per- 
sonality undertaken by one without a greater and more 
intelligent familiarity than I can claim with the results 
obtained up to date by the researches of those who have 
devoted themselves to the study of this subject must 
fall very far short of what such an examination should 
be. For my part I can only confess my shortcomings in 
this respect and confine myself to a modest statement to 
be made in its proper place of such an opinion as I have 
been able, notwithstanding my ignorance of Physiology, 
to form as to the relation of human Personality to the 
bodily organism with which it obviously stands in a most 
intimate relation. 

Those unfortunate features in the development of our 
educational system which have facilitated ignorance of 
the elements of Natural Science in students of Philosophy 
and Theology (and, it may be added, of the elements of 
Philosophy and Theology in students of Natural Science) 
are too obvious to us all for an individual victim of their 
malign influence to take to himself all or perhaps any 
great part of the blame for deficiencies with which they 
have had so much to do. But with the next confession 
of ignorance I have to make the case is difierent. 

It will be thought by many that, while a philosopher 



2i DIVINE PERSONALITY 

may without shame admit his lack of physiological know- 
ledge, he cannot without putting himself out of court 
as a philosopher plead guilty to incompetence in Psycho- 
logy so far as it can be pursued by the introspective 
method, by interrogation of others concerning their 
thoughts and emotions, or by observation of their behaviour 
in response to action exercised not (at any rate directly) 
upon their bodily organism, but upon what we call their 
mental or psychical susceptibility. Nor have I any inten- 
tion of taking up your time by defending myself for what 
I shall frankly admit to have been a reprehensible neglect 
of studies relevant to my own, though not, I will admit, 
specially attractive to myself. I venture to think, indeed, 
that psychologists have often misconceived the scope of 
their science, in believing it possible to make the same 
kind of abstraction when they are dealing with our appre- 
hension of objects as can be made by the students of a 
natural science when dealing with a particular class of 
objects apprehended. But this conviction, which I do 
very decidedly hold, does not excuse anyone who holds 
it from acquainting himself far more fully than I have 
ever done with ascertained facts, which are none the 
less facts that they have been described in a terminology 
coloured by what in my judgment is an erroneous theory. 
There will therefore be in my treatment of the problem 
of human Personality much less reference than might be 
expected — very likely less than there ought to be — to the 
investigations of professional psychologists. But I shall 
not be able to avoid altogether some discussion of what 
is usually called * multiple personality,' and shall have 
to venture on some conclusions as to the relation of the 
phenomena described under that name to the unity which 
might plausibly seem to be essential to what we commonly 



THE SUBJECT INTRODUCED 28 

mean by Personality. In this discussion I shall, however, 
pretend to no more than such a general knowledge of the 
facts in question as may be gathered from the reading of 
certain well-known and easily accessible works by psycho- 
pathological experts, and by summarizers of their results. 

A third and last department of inquiry, for dealing with 
which I must admit myself without any special qualifica- 
tion, is that which is designated in this country by the 
name of ' Psychical Research.' It will be impossible in 
discussing the belief in the possibility of a continuation 
of individual personal life beyond the grave to omit alto- 
gether some consideration of the claim that such research 
has established the high probability or even the certainty 
of such a continuation in particular instances. But here 
also I must confine myself to general impressions and 
considerations. I have never made any attempts to 
engage for myself in investigations of the kind carried on 
by the Society of Psychical Research ; and I can make 
no pretence to that aptitude for careful and even meticulous 
accuracy in observation without which any work in this 
field would be of no evidential value at all. 

In my previous course of Lectures I took less as 
an adequate definition of Personality than as a pro- 
visional attempt to orientate ourselves, so to say, in 
our study of it, the famous definition given in the 
Christological treatise ascribed to Boethius : Persona est 
naturcB rationahilis individua substantia. It may serve 
us as a guide in this way still. But we will now supple- 
ment it by some observations on certain features of our 
everyday use of the word * person ' which become more 
important when we are considering the finite Personality 
of man than they were when our principal subject was the 
affirmation of Personahty in God. 



24 DIVINE PERSONALITY 

While, as we saw in a previous Lecture, we commonly 
use the word ' person/ implying as it does, according to 
the Boethian definition, the possession of rationality by 
those to whom it is applied, only of such human beings 
as have come to ' years of discretion,' and, should not, 
except with a certain playfulness, speak of a child as a 
person, yet sometimes we seem to regard this same word 
as saying the least that can be said of the man or woman 
of whom we use it, sometimes on the other hand as indicat- 
ing that he or she is something more than ordinary. We 
remember how Mr. Pecksniff corrected Mrs. Lupin's descrip- 
tion of Mary Graham in Martin Chuzzlewit ^ as a ' young 
lady' : " ' Mrs. Lupin,' said Mr. Pecksniff, holding up his 
hand with something in his manner as nearly approach- 
ing to severity as any expression of his, mild being that 
he was, could ever do. * Person ! young person ! ' '' 

In this instance and others of the same kind the use of 
the word ' person ' suggests that the speaker wishes to 
say as little as possible of the man or woman in question. 
* Least said soonest mended.' Yet the very colourlessness 
of the expression gives a special sting to the expression, 
which an abusive term would not have had ; just as 
there was something very insolent in the apology made 
by a certain man for mistaking one neighbour for another, 
' You are so exactly like everyone else.' In the same way 
the suggestion of the word ' person ' in the phrase I have 
just quoted from Dickens was that Mary Graham was 
unworthy of being distinguished by any special attention. 

But when the Dolls' Dressmaker in Our Mutual Friend 
called herself ' the person of the house,' she was claiming 
a social dignity which agreed but ill with her tender years ; 
and sometimes, though perhaps oftener by American than 

^ C. 3. 



THE SUBJECT INTRODUCED 25 

by English writers, so and so is said to be * a great person ' 
while the derivatives ' personage ' and ' personaUty ' 
are still more frequently employed in a similar manner 
to suggest especial distinction. 

The idiomatic use of the plural of the word last mentioned, 
* personalities,' noticeably illustrates the ambiguity which 
hangs about this group of expressions. When we depre- 
cate the introduction of * personalities ' into a discussion, 
we no doubt think of it on the one hand as the intrusion 
of what is in this particular connexion trivial, unimpor- 
tant, negligible. We wish, it may be, to hear of rival 
policies, of opposed principles of action, of contrasted 
ideals ; and we find that the champion of one of these in 
attacking the champion of another is dwelling on details 
of the latter' s private life or conduct irrelevant to the 
matter in hand, and are led to suspect that the disputant 
who insists upon these is in the situation of the legendary 
advocate whose brief was endorsed * No case : abuse the 
plaintiff's attorney.' Yet at the same time our dislike 
to the introduction of ' personalities ' into serious debate 
is due in part to our feeling that the private life which 
is thus exploited in the interest of a political or religious 
controversy is, just because of its privacy, something 
sacred, which cannot without a certain impiety be treated 
as a mere means to an alien end, a counter in some one 
else's game. And even where there is contempt expressed 
in calling someone ' a person ' there is in the word, along 
with its refusal of special respect or interest, a certain 
acknowledgment of his status as a member of society, 
which by giving no just occasion to the other to resent 
it as an attack upon his character, bottles up, as it were, 
the wrath which he notwithstanding feels, and may well 
increase the violence of its explosion when it finds a vent. 



26 DIVINE PERSONALITY 

In the Lecture on Personality and Rationality which 
was included in my previous course I have already indicated 
the direction in which we are to look for an explanation 
of the ambiguities which I have just been illustrating 
from our everyday use of the word ' person ' and of its 
derivatives. These words always allow to the human 
being in reference to whom they are employed the dis- 
tinctively human dignity of Rationality ; on the other 
hand they emphasize his or her Individuality. Individu- 
ality, however, they may in a particular context emphasize 
less, not only than the use of a proper name would em- 
phasize it, but less than some other designation, which 
would not be applicable, as ' person ' is, to all rational 
human beings. Thus Tom Pinch or young Martin 
Chuzzlewit would probably not have disliked hearing 
Mary Graham called a ' young lady ' as much as they would 
have disliked her being called a ' young person.' For 
while all ladies are persons, not all persons are ladies ; 
and it is thus more distinctive to be a lady than to be 
a person. Yet it is possible to have a proper name — a 
dog or a horse, a sword or a bridge, a tree or a rock may have 
a proper name — without being a rational being at all ; and, 
though to be a lady is rarer than to be in some sense a 
person, nevertheless in so far as a person does not exercise 
some special and definite function in the system of society, 
he or she is rather potentially than actually a person. 
So again in speaking of so-and-so as a personage or 
more Americano as a ' great person ' one is ascribing to 
the subject of such an assertion something beyond the 
possibilities implied in a certain social status, the possessor 
of which may not have given proof of any such distinctive 
use of his rational faculty as might secure for him a signi- 
ficance out of the common, as we say, and might lead us 



THE SUBJECT INTRODUCED 2T 

to insist at once upon his rationality and his individuaUty 
by calHng him emphatically a person. 

I have perhaps lingered too long over a point which 
is not difficult, although it may need a little thought to 
perceive the bearing of our seemingly inconsistent use of 
these words upon the philosophical investigation of the 
nature of human Personality. But what has been said 
will prepare us for what is to conie. It is in those human 
activities which are distinctively human, because they are 
rational and social, that we must study the nature of 
human Personality ; and it is to be remembered that we 
are to study them with the conclusions of our former course 
in view. We have to ask whether they will be better or 
worse understood if we think of the activity of the Supreme 
Reality, in which " we live and move and have our being," ^ 
as a personal activity, that is, as an activity having the 
form of personal intercourse, whereof in Religion we can 
by virtue of our own personality become participators. 

Before, however, we come to the examination of these 
activities from the point of view thus indicated, it will 
be convenient to call attention to a fact of great impor- 
tance, which must be constantly borne in mind while 
studying human Personality. I mean the fact that many 
of the processes which make up what may be called the 
psychical life of human beings seem to be carried on, 
to use a phrase which has become familiar to us in recent 
years, * below the threshold of consciousness.' While 
profoundly sensible of the disadvantage at which I am 
placed in this regard by my lack of training in the syste- 
matic study of Psychology, I cannot altogether avoid 
the attempt to estimate the part played in the constitu- 
tion of human Personality by the unconscious or sub- 

a Acts xvii. 28. 



28 DIVINE PERSONALITY 

conscious operations of our souls. I venture to express 
myself in these terms, despite the reluctance which 
psychologists often exhibit to commit themselves to an 
affirmation of the existence of a soul. For I am convinced 
that nothing is gained for clearness of thought by avoiding 
the use of the word soul and yet employing expressions 
which, like psyche, psychology, and the like, are mere 
equivalents of or derivatives from equivalents of soul, 
or by attempting to describe perceiving, knowing, think- 
ing, willing, feeling and so forth without reference to any- 
thing which perceives, knows, thinks, wills or feels. For, 
say what we may, we cannot help conceiving such actions 
as the actions of some subject. And if it be contended 
that it is sufficient to speak of them as yours or mine, 
we cannot avoid having at last to face the question whether 
our bodies can be regarded as the subject of perceiving, 
knowing, thinking, willing, or feeling ; and we shall then be 
forced to admit that only a body which is more than 
merely a body, which also is or has a soul, is capable of 
being thus regarded. I should indeed freely acknowledge 
that in thus using the world ' soul ' one must be careful 
to remember that no doctrine of the independence of the 
soul upon the body, still less of its survival of the dissolu- 
tion of the body, should be clandestinely taken for granted. 
We are merely to think of the soul as the subject of per- 
ceiving, knowing, thinking, willing, feeling. But ' soul ' 
has too long been the word appropriated to designate 
precisely this subject, and the distinction of soul from 
body has too long expressed the obvious disparateness 
of these functions from that of motion in space, to be 
abandoned without danger of confusion arising from its 
remaining in the background of our thought as an unre- 
cognized assumption, which would have to be dragged to 



THE SUBJECT INTRODUCED 29 

light if we were forced to explain to one unfamiliar with 
the technical language of psychologists what it is that we 
are talking about. It is better, I cannot but think, 
frankly to use the traditional word and to state plainly 
that we know or do not know, think or do not think, 
this or that about the soul. 

Now it is obvious that since the soul is that which is 
conscious, which perceives and knows, ' the unconscious ' 
is an expression strictly applicable not to soul, but to 
what we cannot think of as perceiving and knowing, that 
is to body as distinguished from soul. And since the 
activity of soul is known to us as dependent in very many 
ways on conditions of body, we might very well speak 
of ' the unconscious ' contributing to the activity of soul, 
when we mean no more than that this activity appears 
to occur in connexion with certain bodily conditions 
and perhaps to take certain forms only in connexion 
with certain specific conditions of body. It is not, however, 
in this sense that I wish now to speak of an unconscious 
factor in the life of the soul. We shall have to turn later 
on to the general question of the mutual relations of soul 
and body. While these no doubt give rise to some very 
difficult problems, the particular problem upon which 
I now wish to offer some observations is not among them. 
Whether the activities of soul should rightly be said to he 
caused by or to be parallel with, or rather to supervene 
upon, or even merely to arise on occasion of, or to have 
been by a pre-established arrangement harmonized with 
certain conditions of body, it is in any case the very start- 
ing-point of the discussion concerning the relations of 
body and soul that the operations which we assign to each 
cannot be expressed in the terms appropriate to the other 
without a passage from one point of view to a different 



80 DIVINE PERSONALITY 

one which is disparate from the former. Thus the problem 
of the connexion with or dependence of activities of soul 
on certain conditions of body must be distinguished from 
the problem of the phenomena which suggest that activities 
such as are proper to the soul may be carried on below 
the threshold of consciousness. It may therefore be 
well to advert for a few moments to a phrase which one 
sometimes finds employed, but of which it may fairly be 
said that it suggests a failure in those who use it to dis- 
tinguish these problems. I refer to the phrase * uncon- 
scious cerebration.' This is one of those phrases which 
should by all means be avoided, since they tend to obscure 
difficulties by language which has (as was recently 
observed of certain political formulas) a ' pleasing and 
sonorous sound ' but which does not tend to intellectual 
enlightenment. 

We shall most of us readily acknowledge that mental 
activity can, normally at any rate, be carried on only if 
the substance of the brain is in a certain condition. We 
should not expect hard intellectual work from a starving 
man ; but we should not on that account think of speaking 
as though the digestive processes were themselves spiritual 
or psychical. Now, when people speak of ' unconscious 
cerebration,' they imply by the use of the epithet ' un- 
conscious ' that they are speaking of a process which is 
sometimes, though not on this occasion, conscious — that is, 
of a spiritual or psychical process ; while, by the use of 
the substantive ' cerebration,' they suggest that they are 
describing, not a process somehow associated with or even 
dependent on movements of the brain substance, but a 
process actually consisting in such a movement, observed 
or inferred in the same way as we observe or infer other 
physical movements which we distinguish altogether 



THE SUBJECT INTRODUCED 31 

from our consciousness of them, and with which we do 
not suppose any psychical counterpart or consequence 
to be associated. Such language is merely misleading, 
and should by all means be avoided. 

We are then not now concerned with bodily antece- 
dents, causes, occasions, or parallels of spiritual or psy- 
chical activity, but with a process regarded as being itself 
of a spiritual or psychical nature, yet nevertheless as un- 
accompanied by any consciousness of it in the soul wherein 
it is supposed to be taking place. It will scarcely be dis- 
puted that there is something paradoxical in the concep- 
tion of such a process, however hard it may be to avoid 
the assumption of its existence. 

It has sometimes been held that, because for us to be 
aware of any object that object must coexist with a con- 
sciousness, we should be justified in saying that we cannot 
conceive the existence of any object apart from conscious- 
ness. The correctness of this reasoning may well be doubted 
in view of the fact that it seems rather to be involved in the 
very notion of Knowledge that the object known should 
be independent of the mental act in and by which it is 
known ; and it may reasonably be suspected that there 
is a fallacy in the way in which the argument is stated ; 
for it is one thing to say that apart from consciousness 
we cannot conceive the existence of an object, another 
to say that we cannot conceive an object to exist apart 
from a consciousness of it. But, however this may be, 
it is clear that when the object in question is a mental 
or psychical operation, many to whom it would never 
occur to see a difficulty in supposing something which 
may become an object of consciousness to exist inde- 
pendently of there being any consciousness of it, would 
nevertheless hesitate to affirm that such a psychical 



32 DIVINE PERSONALITY 

process might exist without there being any consciousness 
of it in the soul to which it belonged. 

It is true that the expression ' consciousness * must here 
be interpreted in a wide sense. It must be understood 
as it is understood when we speak of ' consciously willing ' 
or ' being conscious of ' a pleasure, a pain, or an emotion. 
No doubt even in such phrases as these there is implied 
a distinction between the volition or the feeling and the 
consciousness of it, a recognition that there exists, beside 
these forms of psychical activity, a factor in the whole 
state described which we may properly call cognition. 
But this factor need not be, if I may so put it, disengaged 
from its volitional or emotional concomitants. A state 
of extreme pain, for example, in which we could no longer 
be said to ' look before and after,' but were wholly absorbed 
by the pain from which we were suffering, would yet in 
this wide sense be called a consciousness of pain, or a pain- 
ful consciousness. 

It would perhaps carry us too far afield from our imme- 
diate subject, and it would certainly lead me into regions 
of psychological controversy which I am not competent 
to enter, were I to allow myself to be betrayed into dis- 
cussion of many problems which thrust themselves upon 
our attention when we ask ourselves whether there can 
be any psychical process wholly unaccompanied by 
consciousness in such a wide sense as this. Our experience 
can certainly not be explained without at least admitting 
that what we can only understand as the result of psychical 
activity is sometimes, nay frequently, reached without 
our being able to remember being conscious of such acti- 
vity. But we are far too familiar with forgetting for it 
to be safe to assume that we were never conscious of any- 
thing merely because we do not now remember it. That 



THE SUBJECT INTRODUCED 38 

all our conscious life does not fall within the system of 
what we call our real or waking experience everyone who 
has ever recollected his dreams is well aware. And many 
facts suggest the possibility (which is recognized even 
by ordinary language when we speak of what is ' at the 
back of our minds ') of thoughts and feelings going on 
within us, even while we are awake, in detachment, as it 
were, from the predominant system of thought and feeling, 
and sometimes (as in the case of automatic writing) 
bringing about actions expressive of intelligent purpose 
which are yet inexplicable by the thoughts and feelings 
which enter into that predominant system. 

When we say then that some of the processes which go 
to make up the pyschical life of human beings and to 
constitute what we call their Personality seem to be carried 
on ' below the threshold of consciousness,' we mean by 
' consciousness ' here the single predominant system of 
thoughts and feelings which determines in the main and 
directly the social activities of the individual in question. 
It does not follow that any of the processes carried on in 
this sense subconsciously are really in an absolute sense 
unconscious. And it is to be noted that in certain patholo- 
gical cases, where such dissociations of consciousness 
as with most of us occur only when (as in sleep or delirium) 
we are taking no part in social life are so marked and so 
lasting as to introduce a notable dissociation even into 
the social life of those who are subject to them, we are 
forced to recognize a plurality of predominant systems 
and tend to speak of several ' personalities,' of which 
now one, now another, emerges above the * threshold of 
consciousness.' I defer to a later stage any detailed criti- 
cism of this way of speaking. I am now only concerned 
to call attention to the part played in the constitution of 

3 



34 DIVINE PERSONALITY 

the life of the soul by processes which, judged by their 
results, are of the same kind as those which we call spiritual, 
mental, or psychical, but which, whether in a strict sense 
unconscious or not, go on below the threshold of the 
predominant or social consciousness. If the word * the 
Unconscious ' is used to describe the complex of these 
processes, it should clearly be recognized that it is used 
only by way of contrast with a fuller or more awakened 
consciousness, and not in the sense in which it is applied 
to what, as material, is distinguished altogether from the 
psychical, and therefore to the brain-substance considered 
as, like the whole body, a part of the ' external world,' and 
not as belonging to that whereof we can predicate conscious- 
ness, or, in a word, to the soul. 

Whatever language be preferred, it is certain that human 
Personality cannot be understood apart from activities 
and processes which, though they may not be wholly un- 
accompanied by any sort of consciousness, certainly do 
not enter into what I have described as the predominant 
consciousness. This consciousness has been called above 
also the ' waking ' and the ' social ' consciousness. It 
may be convenient to add a few remarks on these designa- 
tions of it, lest there should be supposed to be involved 
in them more than is intended. 

First, then, as to the expression ' waking consciousness.* 
Our dreams are important in this context, since they 
form a part of what passes below the threshold of our 
predominant consciousness, yet are to a considerable 
extent remembered during our waking life. Although 
no doubt there is a far greater coherence in one's 
waking experience than in one's dreams, yet I am dis- 
posed to think one cannot explain the conviction that 
one is awake merely as an inference from features of the 



THE SUBJECT INTRODUCED 35 

waking life which are empirically found to distinguish 
it from the dream life. Hence I do not think that the 
term * waking ' and ' predominant ' consciousness are 
necessarily synonymous, though usually they refer to the 
same object. In such cases of alternating consciousness 
as those of the celebrated * Miss Beauchamp/ whose 
condition is studied in Dr. Morton Prince's well-known 
work, The Dissociation of a Personality, we should naturally, 
I think, speak of the patient as being awake in more than 
one of her states, while it might be hard to speak of any 
one of them as predominant. 

On the other hand, it is not only in dreams that we have 
to do with the ' unconscious ' or * subconscious.' At 
every stage of the * waking ' life of everybody there occur 
incidents, for example, of forgetfulness, inattention, or 
distraction, the explanation of which is to be found in 
a region of the soul's life of which the person himself may 
be at the moment, at least as regards his predominant 
consciousness, quite unaware.^ Thus if the predominant 
consciousness be called the * waking ' consciousness, it 
is not meant that it by any means controls or determines 
the whole of what takes place while we are awake. 

The phrase * social consciousness ' also calls for some 
commentary. The dream-consciousness is no doubt 
markedly contrasted with the * waking ' consciousness 
b}^ what is sometimes called its ' subjective ' character. 
Dreams are private to the dreamer, and, except in very rare 
circumstances, as when a somnambulist assaults another 
man, when Coleridge dreams a Kuhla Khan or Tartini 
a Trille del Diavolo, or again if a man should be, like 
Hamlet, stirred up to vengeance on his father's murderer 

3 See Freud, Psychopathology of Everyday Life {Psychopaihologie 
d. Alltagsleben, Eng. tr. London, 1914), passim. 



«6 DIVINE PERSONALITY 

by a vision of his father's ghost — except in such circum- 
stances as these they remain quite apart from the dreamer's 
intercourse with his fellow men. It is the waking life 
alone that has direct social consequences and with which 
alone the judgment of society commonly concerns itself. 
Yet the adventures of our dreams are social in their 
character, and the great majority of them, at any rate, are 
modelled, even though with strange distortions, upon the 
social relations of which we have had experience while 
awake. And we may go further than this. 

No one that I know of has thrown more light upon the 
subject of dreams than the eminent Austrian physician 
Dr. Sigmund Freud.4 It is not necessary to be convinced 
by every detail of his theory to recognize the extraordinary 
suggestiveness and the large measure of truth which there 
is in his manner of interpreting the problems of this 
very obscure yet very intimate sphere of our experience. 
Now no feature of Dr. Freud's theory is more characteristic 
or important than his conception of what he calls the 
* censor ' in dreams. According to Dr. Freud every dream 
sets before the dreamer either explicitly or in a symbolical 
form the fulfilment of a wish. In mature life these are 
most often wishes which in waking life are suppressed, 
in consequence of their incongruity with our moral stand- 
ards or social relations. But though in sleep our desires 
seem often to escape from the restraints which duty 
and prudence are, when we are not asleep, constantly 
placing upon them, 5 such escape is very far from complete. 
Frequently the psycho-analysis (as it is called) employed 
by Dr. Freud and his school for the discovery of the sup- 

4 See Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams {Traumdeutung, Eng. 
tr. London, 1913). 

5 Cp. Plato, Rep. ix. 571 c seqq. 



THE SUBJECT INTRODUCED 37 

pressed wishes which, if these investigators are right, lie 
frequently at the root of nervous disorders, has revealed to 
them in dreams of their patients which, even to the dreamers 
themselves, appeared innocent of all connexion with the 
subject of certain wishes, an elaborate symbolism by 
means of which these wishes have attained in masquerade, 
as it were, an imaginary gratification without, by the naked 
exhibition of their true significance, bringing upon them- 
selves the intervention of what Dr. Freud describes as the 
' censor within the soul. ' For the disapproval of this 'censor' 
would otherwise have hindered this result and in breaking 
the dream have prevented the relief given by the seeming 
satisfaction of desires inconsistent with self-respect. The 
* censor within the soul ' is thus much the same as what 
is ordinarily meant by the Conscience, working effectively, 
even when sleep has cut us off from our ordinary social 
surroundings, as the surrogate in the subconscious life, 
if we may so express it, of our moral convictions or social 
prejudices. 

Without following Dr. Freud in all the particulars of his 
view, I do not think that the main facts of what he calls 
a censorship of our dream thoughts can be denied by the 
candid student of his own dreams. And if this fact be 
admitted, we must allow that the psychical life, even when 
it seems most withdrawn into itself from communion with 
one's fellow men, is social through and through ; and that, 
if the waking consciousness may be called social in contrast 
with the dream consciousness, it is because in the 
main only the waking consciousness has direct social 
consequences, not because the dream consciousness is 
not a consciousness of social relations. No matter how 
far we penetrate below the threshold of what we generally 
consider as our ordinary consciousness, we find that the 



38 DIVINE PERSONALITY 

human soul is still social and therefore personal, and that 
its most abstruse recesses are describable in Tennysonian 
phrase as " abysmal depths of Personality." ^ 

Any attempt to comprehend human Personality then 
is certainly doomed to failure that should ignore these 
depths and should content itself with the examination of 
those acti\'ities which are carried on in the full light of the 
agent's explicit consciousness. These activities themselves 
will be found on close inspection to be unintelhgible apart 
from the assumption of the existence of processes in the 
soul to which this Hght has never penetrated. For the 
fuller investigation of such processes we must needs 
employ methods of inquiry akin to those pursued in the 
sciences concerned wdth external nature, rather than to 
those appropriate to what are sometimes called the norma- 
tive sciences, such as are Logic, Ethics, and ^Esthetics, 
sciences which rest (to use a familiar if not a wholly 
satisfactory phraseology^) upon judgments of value and not 
merely upon judgments of existence, distinguishing the 
facts of thought, conduct, and expression as valid or 
invalid, good or evil, beautiful or ugly. 

At the present time, however, there is httle likelihood 
of what goes on ' below the threshold of consciousness ' 
being undul^^ ignored. The danger is probably greater 
that the importance of Reason in human hfe should be too 
much disparaged in comparison with that of feehng and 
instinct. For the romantic reaction of a century ago 
against the Rationahsm of the preceding age has been 
powerfully reinforced by a more recent movement of reac- 
tion at once against the intellectuahst tendency in philoso- 
phy which is associated with the great name of Hegel and 
which was developed in the heart of the romantic movement 
^ Tke Palace of Life. 



THE SUBJECT INTRODUCED 39 

itself, and also against the revived Rationalism of nine- 
teenth-century Natural Science, between which and the 
tendency just mentioned there is a kinship more apparent 
now than in their earlier days of mutual controversy. 
This more recent movement of reaction has received its 
principal stimulus from the habit of thought engendered 
by the evolutionary biology, whose way the Hegelian 
philosophy of development had prepared, while it was 
itself the crowning achievement of nineteenth-century 
Natural Science. So complicated are the relationships 
with which the history of ideas acquaints us. 

The bent of contemporary thought being such as I 
have just described, it is worth while, before passing from 
our present subject, to note that, though the course of 
our articulated thinking and our dehberate action is 
constantly affected by the obscurer processes which we 
contrast with these as ' subliminal/ yet this does not in 
the least warrant us in overlooking the essential difference 
between the categories of Logic and Ethics on the one 
hand and those of empirical Psychology on the other ; or 
justify us in reducing logical inference or the consciousness 
of obligation to the mere association of ideas, images or 
emotions, with the formation or arrangement of which 
principles of Reason and Dut}^ have had nothing to do. 

For, in our interpretation of the obscurer processes 
of which we speak, we are wholly dependent upon our 
knowledge of these principles. In one particular depart- 
ment we have seen how the Freudian interpretation of 
dreams is bound up with the recognition of a ' censor- 
ship,' to which our desires and fancies are still subject 
even in sleep, when we might think ourselves to have 
escaped from our daily burden of responsibiUty. And 
indeed if it is true that when we are awake " we are such 



40 DIVINE PERSONALITY 

stuff as dreams are made of," 7 it must follow that our 
dreams are made of the same stuff as our waking life. 
And into that stuff we shall assuredly find already 
woven threads from the loom of Reason. 

It is only with human life that we have in these Lectures 
to do ; with life, that is, in a part of which the operations 
of Reason are manifest and, as we say, self-conscious. 
For only such a life should we ever think of calling personal. 
But it is the very essence of the contention of those who 
love to dwell upon the narrow limits of these manifest 
operations of Reason, in contrast with the vast domain of 
the instinctive and the unconscious, that the result of 
what is accomplished in these domains is not to be dis- 
tinguished from what would have been accomplished 
by Reason, had it been present ; or that, if distinguished 
at all, it is distinguished by a greater perfection in those 
very qualities which self-conscious Reason deliberately 
aims at producing than is found in the finished work of 
self-conscious Reason itself. 

An older fashion of thought might have seen in this a 
striking evidence that a higher Reason was at work than 
the human ; that the wisdom which we trace in the 
behaviour of living beings which do not seem to reason 
is not their own but God's. No doubt it is difficult for 
us to acquiesce in this explanation of the facts, partly 
(though not solely) because in the adaptation of organisms 
to their environment and in the working of instinct, 
wonderful as these are and interpretable only in terms 
of Reason working towards an end, there are indications 
of trial and error, of occasional failure, of injurious conse- 
quences, which seem incongruous with the immediate 
activity of a perfect intelligence such as we ascribe to 
7 Shakespeare, Tempest, iv. i. 156, 157. 



THE SUBJECT INTRODUCED 41 

God. We prefer therefore to speak of a Reason, immanent 
in the process of Hfe, a phrase which explains Httle or 
nothing, but with which we cannot perhaps dispense.^ 
It is, however, one thing to recognize that human 
PersonaHty (for it is with this that we are now concerned) 
includes a sphere of subconscious and instinctive as well 
as one of fully conscious and deliberate activity, and even 
to admit that the former sphere embraces a far larger 
part of our existence than the latter, and quite another to 
seek in the former rather than in the latter for the dwelhng 
place of all the most valuable elements in our Hfe, and 
especially (to come to what is our main business in these 
Lectures) of ReHgion. This, however, is nowadays not 
infrequently done. Under the influence of WilHam 
James's well-known theory of what in reUgion is known 
as conversion ' as an uprush from the subconscious,' 9 
one of the most eminent of contemporary British theolo- 
gians 10 has sought in the ' subliminal ' region for the divine 
factor in human nature generally, and in particular in the 
nature of him whom the Christian Church acknowledges to 
be very God as well as very man. I do not think that the 
future of theological speculation Hes in the direction thus 
indicated. It is certainly true that the subconscious 
and instinctive Hfe of the soul plays a part and a large 
part in ReHgion, as in every human interest which is more 

8 Cp. Bergson, L' evolution creairice, pp. 279, 283. I may take 
this opportunity of observing that in view of these passages, which 
my friend Mr. K. C. Mukherjea has pointed out to me, I should 
not have contrasted M. Bergson's view with Plato's so sharply 
as I did in my Studies in the History of Natural Theology, p. 91. 

9 See James, Varieties of Religious Experience, Lectures VIII, 
IX, X. 

" Sanday, Christologies Ancient and Modern. I have discussed 
this interesting book in a review pubUshed in the Oxford Magazine 
for Nov. 24, 1910 (vol. xxix, p, 103). 



42 DIVINE PERSONALITY 

than occasional or superficial. With this statement the Aj 
religious traditions of mankind are fully in accord ; and ■! 
(to advert once more for a moment to the doctrine just 
mentioned of the Godhead of Jesus Christ) the orthodox 
theology of Christendom has been at pains to insist that, 
in the case of its Master, the divinity which it ascribed 
to him was no mere accession of dignity to a personality 
originally merely human, but belonged to him from the 
very first. This is not the place to examine the validity 
of this assertion as regards the Founder of Christianity ; 
it is only mentioned here in order to show that it is no 
new thing for Religion to acknowledge the immanence 
of Godhead in what it is now fashionable to call the sub- 
liminal region of our spiritual life. 

But to go to the opposite extreme and so to insist upon 
this immanence as even by implication to represent the 
life which is fully self-conscious as less capable than the 
subliminal life of the divine indwelHng, this is not indeed 
altogether a new thing — for Religion has from very ancient 
days been haunted by the magic of wizards " that peep 
and that mutter," ^^ as by its dme damnee — but it is a re- 
trogression from levels long ago reached by the greatest 
teachers of mankind. Such a view can in my judgment 
only be justified by a mode of thought ^^ which would 
disparage Religion as belonging essentially to the lower 
ranges of intellectual development and as destined to 
wither away in the maturity of science and civilization. 

The withdrawal of a large part of our spiritual life 
from the full light of consciousness into the subliminal 



" Is. viii. 19. 

li Such as that of Comte and of the school of French sociologists 
studied in my Group Theories of Religion ; or again of Signer 
Benedetto Croce. 



THE SUBJECT INTRODUCED 43 

region seems to serve in the economy of nature a time- 
saving purpose. 

We ourselves often, of deliberate intent, relegate thither 
much that we desire should not occupy the attention we 
would fain leave free for other and higher tasks. Thus we 
prefer that many of the actions of our daily toilet should 
be performed automatically ; and trust ourselves to 
repeat a formula mechanically which, if we reflected upon 
its meaning, we might not be able to pronounce with equal 
accuracy. And what we thus do in certain cases of set 
purpose. Nature (as we speak) does for us on a larger scale. 
It is difficult to conceive of Personality under our conditions 
of time and space without such a resource. But, in our 
attempts to represent to ourselves as best we may a spiri- 
tual life emancipated from those conditions, we are apt 
to dispense with a subliminal element. Thus Aristotle ^3 
speaks of the Divine Life as an activity in which there is 
nothing merely potential or latent. And one of the New^ 
Testament writers suggests a like thought in a figure when 
he declares that '* God is light and in him is no darkness 
at all." 14 But we should do wrong to interpret such 
sayings as implying that we ought to think of Spirit 
at its highest after the fashion of an activity which, like 
that of a finite soul, rests upon and issues from a substratum 
such as Aristotle called vXi] or matter, while at the 
same time we suppose this substratum away. In the 
obscure speculations of the great German mystic Jacob 
Behmen concerning the ' fiery principle ' in God, which is 
the very source of the divine glory, but which, when the 
true light does not thus break forth out of it, becomes 
the ' wrath of God,' the habitation of devils, there is inti- 
mated a truth which should never be overlooked in this 
'3 See Ar., Metaph. A. 7. '4 i John i. 5. 



44 DIVINE PERSONALITY 

connexion. We must not think of anything in our own 
spiritual life that has substance or power or value as 
excluded from the Divine Life. That which, apart from 
that life,~ gives to evil all its attraction and its force is 
nevertheless present in that life as what we can perhaps 
only describe as an energy contributory (not merely in 
subordination to the rest, but rather in co-ordination with 
them) to the whole eternal activity which is the being 
of God. If symbols we must have (and surely we need to 
have symbols, though we should be ever on our guard against 
treating them as the masters not as the servants of our 
thought), then the bush of the prophet's vision which was 
all on fire and yet was not consumed ^5 is no bad symbol 
of him who is that which he is not only temporarily, 
partially, or potentially, but actually, fully, and eternally. 

Unless the account given in the preceding course of 
Lectures was wholly mistaken, there is in Religion when 
it has attained its highest level, an experience of a perfect 
spiritual life, to which such terms as we have just used 
would be applicable, manifested in the form of personal 
intercourse. 

We will now pass to the consideration of the various 

activities in which human Personality expresses itself, 

in their relation to the supreme spiritual Reality which is 

revealed to the human soul in the experience that we call 

Religion. 

»5 Exod. iii. 2. 



LECTURE II 

DIVINE PERSONALITY AND THE ECONOMIC 

LIFE 

When the philosopher or theologian turns his attention 
to the various forms of activity in which human Personality 
expresses itself, it is at once caught by those which occupy 
the foreground in the record of human achievement, 
and confer celebrity on those who have been distinguished 
by their success in them — by Science, by Art, by Morality, 
by Politics, by Religion. Yet even in the case of those 
who are reckoned as the chief representatives of our race 
in these several fields the greater part of human life is 
not devoted to these dignified pursuits. Much of it is 
passed in sleep and, as the mention in the last lecture of 
Dr. Freud and the psycho-analysts may have reminded 
us, what passes in sleep is by no means to be ignored in 
the study of the personality of any particular human 
being. But even of waking life the business of satisfying 
the appetites which serve for the maintenance of the 
individual and the continuance of the species — of eating 
and drinking and mating — consumes a very considerable 
proportion. 

It might be thought at first sight that, since these 
appetites are by no means peculiar to man, but are common 
to him with the lower animals, to which we do not ascribe 
Personality, the portion of human life which in the time- 

45 



46 DIVINE PERSONALITY 

table of our days is accounted for by them might be left 
on one side in a description of our personal activities. 
But, though the appetites are not peculiar to man, the 
deliberate and systematic provision which man makes 
for their gratification is something to which we find no 
real parallel elsewhere ; and hence Plato was justified 
in giving to that type of human life which is characterized 
by preoccupation with this provision to the exclusion of 
other interests a name borrowed from the wealth which 
is accumulated by human beings to constitute a permanent 
source whence a means of satisfying their animal appetites 
can be regularly procured. ^ 

A similar thought seems to have dictated the use of 
* economic ' by a contemporary philosopher to whom I 
have already referred, Signor Benedetto Croce, to denote 
the whole range of human action which is not determined 
by ethical considerations. And it is to be noted that 
where we seem to detect anything analogous to this deli- 
berate and systematic provision for the satisfaction of 
appetite among creatures other than men — for example 
among bees and ants — we are apt to use words — such as 
' economy ' and the like — v/hich belong properly to a life 
which, however much dominated by animal desires, 
nevertheless shows itself by its calculating and systematic 
character to be, as rational, distinctive of humanity and, 
we may legitimately say, expressive of personality. 

But while noting that the form of human activity which 
may be called, in the sense above given to the word, the 
economic is to be reckoned on its own account among the 
main manifestations of Personality, it must not be over- 
looked that it is perhaps never found in actual detachment 
from some of the others which were previously enumerated. 
I See Plat. Rep. ix, 580 e. 



THE ECONOMIC LIFE 47 

These other forms of human activity indeed make their 
first appearance, it would seem, in the service (so to speak) 
of the economic activity ; while on the other hand it is 
probably not possible to discover a stage of human develop- 
ment at which none of them are associated with it, even 
if only in a menial capacity. 

In saying that the other, and, as we are disposed to 
consider them, the higher forms of activity in which human 
Personality seeks and finds expression make their first 
appearance in the service of the economic activity, I 
must not be understood to be asserting that these higher 
forms are to be explained away as mere modes of the 
economic. On the contrary I am satisfied that it is wholly 
impossible to derive our desires for Knowledge, for Beauty, 
for Goodness, for Fellowship, or for God from the primitive 
appetites which minister to the preservation of the individ- 
ual organism and the continuance of the species. To 
use the phraseology traditional in modern philosophy, 
I am convinced that apart from the recognition of a 
priori principles, the affirmations which we make in the 
Sciences, in Logic and Metaphysic, in Ethics and Politics, 
in ^Esthetic and Theology cannot be justified. It is, how- 
ever, in no wise inconsistent with this conviction readily 
to admit that, while the desire for Knowledge is something 
of an utterly different nature from any bodily appetite, 
the best means of satisfying those appetites are among 
the things that man first desires to know. So too we shall 
not be surprised to find primitive Ethics much occupied 
with right and wrong ways of securing food or a mate, 
or primitive Religion with obtaining divine assistance in 
the accomplishment of these tasks. We shall be prepared 
to agree with Aristotle » that the community which exists 
* Pol. i. 2, 1252 b 29. 



48 DIVINE PERSONALITY 

for the sake of living well came into existence for the sake 
of mere living ; and to think it no improbable suggestion 
of modern anthropologists that the beginnings of pictorial 
art are to be sought in practices the main object of which 
was by sympathetic magic to promote the capture of ani- 
mals which, as food or otherwise, might serve the economic 
purposes of their captors. 

But while the primitive subservience of the desire for 
Knowledge and the rest to the business of supplying animal 
needs marks the kinship of man with the beasts, the fact 
that he seeks to use in the service of these needs objects 
which it does not enter into the heart of the beasts to 
conceive marks the superiority of his nature to theirs, 
as the rational animal, whose nature is in each fully- 
developed individual of the kind capable of what we call 
personality. 

The problem to which we have now to address ourselves 
is that of the congruity of a doctrine of Personality in God, 
such as we found in the previous course was suggested by 
religious experience, with the economic life of man, the 
activities of which constitute as we have seen, at least as 
measured in terms of the time consumed in them, a very 
large proportion of the whole range of human conduct. 

Now the first thing which strikes us in this connexion 
is that the man in whom the economic interest is dominant 
is apt to regard Religion, especially in its most fully 
developed forms, as an irrelevant extravagance, which 
belongs to another world altogether than that in which 
his daily life is passed. If there be such another world, 
it will be soon enough to concern oneself with it when 
one is done with this ; till then, as Mistress Quickly says 
to the dying Falstaff, " a should not think of God ; there 
was no need to trouble himself with any such thoughts 



THE ECONOMIC LIFE 49 

yet. "3 And on their side the teachers of Religion seem 
to grudge to his pursuits the time and labour which he 
spends upon them. They deprecate his anxiety concerning 
what he shall eat and what he shall drink and what he 
shall put on. 4 They dispute the claim of the economic 
interest to more than a very subordinate place in human 
life. " A man's life consisteth not in the abundance of 
things which he possesseth." 5 " Meats for the belly and 
the belly for meats, but God shall destroy both it and 
them." 6 '' The kingdom of God is not meat and drink." 7 
Such sayings illustrate the antagonism which exists 
between the religious and the economic interest, and in 
view of this antagonism it would seem that the conception 
of religious experience as personal intercourse can hardly 
fail to appear incongruous with a way of thinking which 
would concede to the economic life the serious importance 
which it claims for itself, just because of the present reality 
with which this conception invests what to the economic 
man is only tolerable when regarded as something remote 
and devoid of immediate practical importance. 

We thus encounter, at the very outset of our inquiry, 
an obvious incongruity between one of the forms of activity 
in which human Personality manifests itself — and that 
the form which possesses, though, maybe, not a greater 
intensity or a higher value, yet a wider extension than any 
other — and the conceptions which our former inquiries 
recommended to us as expressive of religious experience 
at its best. The next consideration to which I will call 
your attention, while it will still further emphasize this 
incongruity, may tend to show that we need not, on account 
of it, abandon the hope of attaining to a view of the human 

3 Shakespeare, Henry F, ii. 3. 4 See Matt. vi. 25. 

S Luke xii. 15. 6 j Cor. vi. 13. 7 Rom. xiv. 17. 

4 



50 DIVINE PERSONALITY 

spirit and its place in the universe which will not resolve 
into an illusion our religious experience of a personal 
intercourse with God. 

This consideration is that of the peculiar relation of the 
economic life to the other forms of human life which have 
been enumerated, and especially to the ethical. To the 
ethical life the economic stands in a relation at once posi- 
tive and negative. On the one hand the economic activity 
is the absolute presupposition of the ethical and of all 
the other ' higher * activities. We find this acknowledged 
by the Preacher on the Mount in the midst of his em- 
phatic prohibition of an anxious preoccupation with econ- 
omic interests which would postpone to them the search 
for " the kingdom of God and his righteousness." ^ '' Your 
heavenly Father knoweth/' he says, '* that ye have need 
of all these things " ; that is, of those things to the securing 
of which the economic life is devoted. And the scientific 
or the artistic activity is as little able to dispense with 
the economic as are the moral and religious. 

On the other hand it is impossible to regard the ethical 
life as a mere development of or even as a mere addition to 
the economic. There is a necessarj^ relation of antagonism 
between them. This truth also finds memorable expres- 
sion in another saying from the same Gospel discourse : 
" Ye cannot serve God and mammon." 9 Critics of 
Kant's ethical doctrine have often found fault with 
certain utterances of his which seemed to imply that only 
where an action has no economic value can it possess a 
moral. Such an assertion (I do not say that Kant 
really intended to make it) would no doubt be mistaken ; 
we shall indeed see later on that, on the contrary, every 
moral act must possess also an economic character. But 
8 Matt. vi. 32, 33. 9 Matt. vi. 24. 



THE ECONOMIC LIFE 51 

the language which these critics have in view has its 
origin in this philosopher's profound sense of the negative 
relation between the ethical and the economic activities, 
without recognizing which it is assuredly impossible to 
grasp the essential nature of Morahty. For how can we 
bring home to ourselves what we mean by saying that 
we ought to do this or that, except by means of the contrast 
between what we ought to do and what we should like 
to do? 

It is true that there is what we may call an economic 
' ought/ as when we say that we ought to forgo some plea- 
sures in youth if we would secure for ourselves a comfort- 
able old age. But though this ' hypothetical imperative/ 
as Kant would call it, is certainly not the ' categorical 
imperative ' of morality, on the hypothesis of the absolute 
worth of eventual comfort it presents the same negative 
relation towards what we like as the truly moral ' ought ' ; 
and its discordance from the latter only appears when we 
ask ourselves whether this hypothetical end is really itself 
of absolute worth and therefore the pursuit of it really 
obligatory. For to this question it is possible to reply 
that we prefer the ' bird in the hand ' of the present 
gratification to the * two in a bush ' represented by the 
prospect of comfort in years which we may not live to 
see ; and, so long as we hold to the economic standard 
of comparison and do not introduce truly ethical considera- 
tions, this reply will annihilate the obHgation implied in 
the original statement thatwe ' ought ' to deny ourselves 
the pleasure which now offers itself. The economic ' ought ' 
turns out therefore to derive its obligatory character 
from an assumption which need not be made ; and it is 
of course for this very reason that Kant distinguishes from 
it the genuine command of Morality as being categorical. 



52 DIVINE PERSONALITY 

since that command does not depend upon any such 
assumption. 

No attempt to understand the nature of human 
Hfe or of the personality which manifests itself therein 
can conceivably be successful which does not recognize 
as a fundamental characteristic of it this relation at once 
positive and negative between the ethical and economic 
activities. Not merely is the latter activity the absolute 
presupposition of the former, but every ethical action 
must have an economic aspect. This has often given 
rise to perplexity in thoughtful minds. For it is impos- 
sible for him who perceives a moral obligation not to 
regard its fulfilment, however contrary to what others may 
call his * interests,' as notwithstanding his true interest ; 
nor can he but be dissatisfied if he falls short of what he 
knows to be his duty, however great the advantage in 
other respects which he may gain thereby. And hence 
he is apt to be assailed by the sophistry that thus, after 
all, his morality is but a refined self-seeking, and the 
ethical life merely a variety of the economic. 

We shall, however, do well to note that, as the proverb 
says, ' Two can play at that game.' There is a counter- 
sophistry which, if less familiar to ordinary reflection, is 
equally plausible and equally inconclusive, and this the 
enthusiast for morality may bring forward in reply. 
When once we have come in view of the sovereign claim 
upon us of the Moral Law, we may feel ourselves uneasy 
in the contemplation of those numerous actions of our 
lives which are performed on impulse or at least without 
a thought of anything but the gratification of some 
appetite or some emotional desire. Is it worthy of a 
moral being to admit such actions ? Must there not be 
a right and a wrong on every occasion, and ought we not 



THE ECONOMIC LIFE 53 

always to stay and consider what they are ? Shall we 
not give an account of every idle word in the day of 
judgment ? ^o and therefore ought we to allow any utter- 
ance of ours to he an idle word and not rather a deliberate 
expression of our judgment and will ? " 

Though such questions as these are, as I said, less often 
asked than those which bring into doubt the disinterested- 
ness of all moral actions, they are common enough among 
the scrupulous and self-tormenting minority of mankind ; 
and even those who are not of that number are not un- 
frequently haunted by a suspicion that a thorough-going 
morality would dictate to a larger part of life than seems 
commonly to be brought within its purview ; and hence 
that such a thorough-going morality is impossible, or at 
least does not in fact exist even among those who profess 
to live by a higher rule than the economic. But there is 
sophistry in this kind of reasoning also. No part of life 
over which the will has any power is without a moral 
character, or can plead exemption from the liability to be 
judged at the tribunal of conscience. Yet not only does 
it fall within the competence of that tribunal to acquit 
of any offence many actions done impulsively and spon- 
taneously, when they come up for judgment ; we even 
judge it right and good that impulse and spontaneity 
should have a field within which they may have free 
play ; and condemn as wrong a pedantic scrupulosity 
which denies them this privilege. 

We need not therefore regard it as inconsistent with 
a view of human life which will give its due place to 
Religion as personal intercourse with God to admit 
the negative relation between the higher forms of human 

" See Matt. xii. 36. 

" Cp. God and Personality, Lecture V, on Fichte's moral 
philosophy. 



54 DIVINE PERSONALITY 

activity and the economic, which is yet the presupposi- 
tion of the rest. We shall do better to regard this same 
negative relation as a fundamental characteristic of the 
human spirit ; and cease to attempt to get rid of it by 
endeavouring either on the one hand to exclude spontaneity 
and impulse from the moral Hfe or on the other to bring 
morahty under an economic formula. 

I think that we must allow that even those great masters 
of moral philosophy, Plato and Aristotle, and especially 
the latter, in their attempt to exhibit moral goodness 
as the successful performance of man's function and as 
the means to happiness and its chief constituent, failed 
to bring out, as it should be brought out, and as Kant, 
for example, with whatever exaggerations of emphasis 
and neglect of certain aspects of Hfe, did bring out, the 
essential diversity of the ethical from the economic stand- 
point of judgment. 

I have dwelt at length upon the relation of the economic 
form of human activity to the ethical because it is here 
that may most clearly be observed that feature of the 
hfe of Spirit in which it ' denies itself,' sets itself in opposi- 
tion to what is notwithstanding essential to its own being 
and presupposed in this very revulsion from it ; and through 
this inner conflict achieves a fuller and richer existence 
than it could otherwise have attained. 

But it will be worth our while briefly to survey the re- 
lations borne to the economic activity by the other higher 
activities which have been above enumerated. 

In respect of that one among them with which we are 
in these Lectures most especially concerned, namely 
the religious, its intimate connexion with the ethical 
is generally recognized ; nor is this the place to enlarge 
upon the no less important distinctions which must be 



THE ECONOMIC LIFE 55 

drawn between these two closely allied forms of human 
life. Whatever has been said of the relation between the 
economic and the ethical activities may be said also 
of that between the economic and the rehgious. The 
former is the presupposition of the latter ; and yet, when 
the rehgious hfe is fuUy estabhshed, it claims to be par- 
amount even in the economic sphere. The sophistry 
which takes occasion from the economic aspect belonging 
to any action to attempt the subsumption of Morality 
under an economic formula is ready to undermine in like 
manner the independence of Rehgion. The counter- 
sophistry of moral rigorism finds a rehgious analogue in 
the extravagance of mystics and ascetics all the world over. 
That these extravagances are, however, no necessary feature 
of Rehgion, or even of mysticism and asceticism, we may 
learn from the attitude of so great a mystic and ascetic 
as St. Theresa, who was ever on the watch against encour- 
aging among her nuns illusions due to fasting and want of 
sleep, and offered to God as an agreeable sacrifice the care 
she took of her own body.^^- While they give vent to the 
emotions engendered by the revulsion from the economic 
view of hfe which is a normal feature of Religion and 
which under certain circumstances finds expression in 
the experience known as 'conversion,' they nevertheless 
imply a neglect of the very negative relation which renders 
this revulsion necessary, since they treat the friction 
between flesh and Spirit upon which the movement of 
the rehgious hfe depends as though it could be abohshed 
to the advantage of that hfe by the practical ehmination 
of the flesh. If the perpetual sacrifice and yet the contin- 
ual need of ' all these things ' which the economic activity 

i^. See Letters of Si. Teresa, tr. Dalton, Letter VII (to the Bishop 
of Osma), p. i6. 



56 DIVINE PERSONALITY 

seeks to obtain and secure, are alike necessary conditions 
of religious activity, we shall scarcely find the nature of 
this activity better expressed than in a religion of personal 
intercourse which represents that sacrifice as made to 
the bountiful Father whose gifts they are, and further 
by means of a doctrine of the incarnation and self-oblation 
of the eternal Son as falling not without but within the 
Divine Life itself. 

Turning from the rehgious to the social or pohtical 
activity, a close mutual connexion will be generally ad- 
mitted to exist between it and the ethical, the relation 
whereof to the economic has already been considered. 
Some indeed may even afhrm that the social and ethical 
activities are actually identical. Here too it is un- 
necessary to advert to the distinctions which may be 
drawn between them, for this subject must be considered 
more fully by us hereafter. But we have here to observe 
that, while the economic activity cannot be denied to 
be the presupposition of any social activity which aims 
at other than economic ends, it may be said that there 
is certainly no such negative relation between the two 
types of life as was alleged when we contrasted the ethical 
and religious activities with the economic. The economic 
activity is social from the outset. The rational human 
being in regard to whom (or to beings not human, so far 
as they are conceived to resemble men in possessing a 
capacity for social organization) we are alone accustomed 
to speak of economy, is always TroXm^ov 4wov, a social 
animal. 1 3 

For the present it will be sufficient to meet this observa- 
tion with a reference to a celebrated saying of Aristotle's 
which has already been quoted above. m The State, he 

13 Aristotle, Pol. i. 2. 1253 a 3. 14 See p. 47 supra. 



THE ECONOMIC LIFE 57 

says— and the State is for him the typical community- 
came into being for the sake of mere Hving— that is, as 
we may put it, is originally purely economic — but now 
exists for the sake of living well — that is, is now not 
economic merely but mainly ethical. The relation, at 
once positive and negative, which we have shown to hold 
between the economic and ethical activities will then hold 
between the economic community and the ethical. And 
when I spoke earher in this Lecture of the desire which 
serves as motive to the social or political activity as a 
desire for fellowship, I had in view the activity of the 
community which, while not ceasing to be economic in 
its organization, is already in its ultimate principle of 
determination ethical. 

When we turn to the relation of the economic life to 
the scientific, we find ourselves in the presence of facts 
which it may seem difiicult to harmonize with the view, 
suggested by those which we have just been surveying, that 
the higher human activities, while resting upon the econo- 
mic activity as their necessary and constant presupposi- 
tion, live in and by a revulsion from it and opposition to 
it. Yet we shall, I think, find that the case of Science 
is not so different from those of MoraUty and ReHgion as 
might at first appear. 

The economic activity is of course the necessary condi- 
tion of the scientific as of the other activities of human 
fife which we have already considered. Moreover this 
positive relation between them is not merely admitted 
by the higher of the two, it is readily proclaimed and 
insisted upon. A negative relation between them, such 
as that which we have found to exist between the economic 
and ethical activities, is less obvious. The masters of 
them that know do not seem to take up the same attitude 



58 DIVINE PERSONALITY 

of opposition towards the riches of this world with which 
we are famiUar in the preachers of morals and religion. 
Where we find something of the same sort in a philosopher 
— in a Pythagoras, a Socrates, an Epictetus, a Kant,— 
we are apt to think of such men as being rather (or at 
least no less) moralists or religious teachers than representa- 
tives of Science strictly so called. We think the charac- 
teristic view of science better exhibited in Aristotle's 
emphasis on the fact that Philosophy arises only when 
men have by the acquisition of wealth beyond their 
immediate bodily needs raised themselves to a position 
of affluence and economic security ^5 ; or in Bacon's insist- 
ence that the function of Science is to minister to the 
increase of commodities for the relief of man's estate, 
and in his prophetic anticipations of the lavish expendi- 
ture of public resources in a well-organized effort to con- 
trol nature by the discovery of its laws.^^ The undis- 
sembled love of the men of the Renascence for power and 
wealth and splendour and their contempt for the ascetic 
institutions with whose decadence they were familiar 
were intimately associated with their passion for know- 
ledge and freedom of thought. 

But though a negative relation to the economic activity 
is not so manifestly characteristic of the scientific life 
as of the ethical and religious, such a relation notwith- 
standing exists in the case of this form of life also. 

We have heard not a little of late about the importance 
of bearing in mind the purpose we have in view in making 
any particular statement descriptive of our knowledge 
or opinion concerning this or that matter. It has even 
been suggested that to recognize the variety of purposes 
is to abandon the conception of an ' absolute ' truth as 

15 Ar. Met. A. i. 981 b 20 seqq, ^^ Bacon, N.O. i. 81. 



THE ECONOMIC LIFE 59 

unprofitable and fallacious. This suggestion appears to 
me to be quite wide of the mark. Some simple illustra- 
tions will best explain my meaning. My purpose in 
inquiring into my expenditure during the past year may 
be to produce an accurate balance-sheet — or only to 
satisfy myself how much I can conveniently invest in 
War Bonds. In the latter case I may ignore the shillings 
and pence ; in the former I shall not be content without 
accounting for every one of these. I shall therefore, 
it may be said, take an answer in round figures as ' true ' 
for the one purpose, as ' false ' for the other. Does 
anyone suppose that there is anything here which detracts 
from the * absoluteness ' of truth ? The common phrases 
* true enough for the purpose in hand ' and ' exactly 
true ' express precisely what we think in such a case. 

But no doubt there may be instances more difficult 
to deal with. There is a sa3dng often used about stories 
told of our acquaintance : * Non e vero ma ben trovato.' 
And conversely a story may be ' true ' yet quite misleading 
if taken as characteristic of the person of whom it is 
related, so that it may (we think) be legitimately sup- 
pressed or even, at least by implication, denied in the 
interests of truth. Or, once more, we may hold our ver- 
acity to be unimpaired when we answer a question which 
is casually asked of us according to the knowledge acces- 
sible to us apart from confidential information which the 
interlocutor has no reason to suppose us to possess. I 
do not complicate the discussion by reference to cases 
involving a famihar ethical problem, such as that of the 
man intentionally asked about a secret matter by one 
who has no right to inquire into it ; or of the would-be 
murderer seeking to know the v/hereabouts of his intended 
victim. But even in these cases there is nothing to 



6a DIVINE PERSONALITY 

support the suggestion which I am criticizing. Our pur- 
pose in asking or answering the questions put to us always 
governs our choice or our interlocutor's choice of an answer ; 
and no doubt the inevitable abstraction from any particular 
purpose in the examples given by writers of text-books 
on logic does impart to these examples a certain air of 
unreality. These writers too must in fairness be, like 
others, judged in the light of their own special purpose. 
Nevertheless the answer, whatever it is, must be truej 
if true at all, independently of the wishes of asker or 
answerer. And its truth must in this sense be ' absolute.' 

This is indeed the presupposition of all discourse, of 
asking and of answering alike. The doctor who holds 
out to his patient a hope that he may still recover when 
in fact there is no prospect of his doing so may be justified 
on the ground that the false expectation which he thus 
arouses will prolong the sick man's life or spare him terror. 
That is a question of morals. But no one would say that 
the doctor was telling the truth. 

I have spent too long a time in labouring a point which 
I can only say at last is to me strictly speaking beyond 
dispute ; namely that my notion of truth implies its 
* absoluteness ' in the sense of its independence upon the 
purposes which govern its communication, and that any 
attempt to explain what truth is in terms which do not 
imply that we already know what it is, is doomed from 
the first to failure. 

What is the bearing of all this upon our present inquiry ? 
This : that it may bring out, by showing the ineptitude 
of the attempts sometimes made to deny it, the indepen- 
dence or autonomy of the activity of Knowledge, which, 
however often we may find it enlisted in the service of 
desires and interests of the kind which we have described 



THE ECONOMIC LIFE 61 

as economic, implies the presence of a capacity of appre- 
hending what is true ; absolutely true, if you will, although 
this adverb does not add anything to which is involved 
in the word ' true ' itself. 

Apart from the acknowledgment that we possess such 
a capacity, the whole fabric of our thought will collapse 
and, with the rest, the theories of those who call in question 
the truth of our possessing it, and in so doing assume that 
they know what is meant by truth, and confess that they 
are seeking for it in the answer to the question which they 
put. Students of Aristotle will remember how, despite 
his interest in the psychological antecedents and accom- 
paniments of Knowledge, we constantly find him speaking ^7 
of the faculty of Knowledge itself, the vovq as he calls it, 
the Intellect or Understanding, as of something ' apart ' 
from these, and once at least even as coming * from 
without ' i8 into a soul in whose development up to the 
point at which this higher nature supervened upon it 
there had been nothing to explain it. It is sometimes 
thought by those who first meet with such language 
as this that the great thinker whom a conventional 
tradition, illustrated by Raphael's cartoon at the Vatican, 
has so often contrasted with Plato as the man whose eyes 
are fixed upon the everyday world around us with the 
heaven- gazing watcher of things eternal, has here turned 
mystic for the nonce and patched his philosophy of 
experience with a piece of transcendent speculation. 
Such an explanation of Aristotle's doctrine of the vovq is, 
I am convinced, wholly mistaken. In it he is, I have no 
doubt, only insisting, in terms which may or may not 

^7 Ar. de Anima, iii, 5. 430 a 17 ; ii. 2. 413 b 24, seqq. ; Eth. Nic, 
X. 8. 1178 a 22. 

18 Ar. de Gen. An. ii. 3, 736 b 28 ; cf. 6. 744 b 21. 



62 DIVINE PERSONALITY 

be well chosen, upon the necessity of ascribing to Know- 
ledge an independence and autonomy, which if it does not 
possess, it is not Knowledge at all, and Science in every 
form must yield place to a bottomless and self-destroying 
scepticism. This independence and autonomy of Know- 
ledge establishes between it and the economic life, even A| 
when it is most completely subservient to the ends of that 
life, a negative relation such as we more easily recognize 
to hold between the ethical and the economic activities 
of the human spirit. 

When we pass to the aesthetic activity which is sti- 
mulated by the desire for Beauty we find, to an even 
greater degree than in the case of the scientific, that 
the positive relation between it and the economic is far 
more readily recognizable than the negative. 

Joy in the things with which the economic activity is 
concerned rather than revulsion from them or repudia- 
tion of them seems to be its characteristic. Nevertheless 
the negative relation may be seen here also. I will content 
myself with a quotation from the writings of one whose, 
own life was devoted to the service of the Beautiful, 
and who moreover, as the words I shall cite sufficiently 
show, was fully alive to the contrast in their respective 
outlook upon the objects of the economic activity between 
Art and Religion. It is Francis Thompson who thus 
addresses ' the dead Cardinal of Westminster.' 

Call, holy soul, O call 
The hosts angelical 
And say 
" See, far away 

" Lies one I saw on earth ; 

One stricken from his birth 

With curse 

Of destinate verse. 



THE ECONOMIC LIFE 63 

" What place does He ye serve 
For such sad spirit reserve, 
Given 
In dark heu oi Heaven 

" The impitiable Daemon 
Beauty to adore and dream on, 
To be 
Perpetually 

" Hers, but she never his ? 
He reapeth miseries, 
Foreknows 
His wages woes. 

" He lives detached days ; 
He serveth not for praise ; 
For gold 
He is not sold ; 

" Deaf is he to the world's tongue ; 
He scorn eth for his song 
The loud 
Shouts of the crowd ; 

" He asketh not world's eyes ; 
Not to world's ears he cries ; 
Saith, ' These 
vShut, if he please ' ; 

" He measureth world's pleasure, 
World's ease, as Saints might measure ; 
For hire 
Just love entire. 

" He asks, not grudging pain ; 
And knows his asking vain, 
And cries — 
' I.ove ! Tove ! ' and dies, 

" In guerdon of long duty 
Unowned by Love or Beauty ; 
And goes — 
Tell, tell, who knows ! 



64 DIVINE PERSONALITY 

" Aliens from Heaven's worth, 
Fine beasts who nose i' the earth. 
Do their 
Reward prepare. 

" But are his great desires 
Food but for nether fires ? 
Ah me, 
A mystery ! 

" Can it be his alone. 
To find, when all is known. 
That what 
He solely sought 

" Is lost, and thereto lost 
All that its seeking cost ? 
That he 
Must finally, 

" Through sacrificial tears 
And anchoretic years. 
Tryst 
With the sensualist ? " 

The upshot of the examination to which we have just 
subjected in turn the various higher activities of human I 
Hfe is that in them all, although more obviously in the i 
ethical and religious than elsewhere, there is a positive 
and a negative relation towards the economic activity, 
upon which, while it serves them all as an indispensable 
foundation and condition, each after its own fashion 
turns its back as it were and finds itself in and through 
perpetually sacrificing to a new end of its own discovery 
the primary ends of that activity which it set out at 
first to subserve. 

It might seem to be required by our plan that we should 
here ask whether such a doctrine of Divine Personality 
as it was suggested in our former course would represent 
the testimony of the most highly developed religious 



THE ECONOMIC LIFE 65 

experience will cast any light upon what we have called 
in the present Lecture the economic activity in human 
life. We shall probably be prepared, when we consider 
the peculiar relation which we have described as existing 
between this activity and those which we are accustomed 
to regard as * higher ' in the scale of value, to find that 
our view of the economic aspect of human Personality is 
less affected than our view of its other aspects by the 
doctrine in question. 

A few words may, however, be said concerning the 
religion of the economic man. In strictness, indeed, 
if there be any truth in our account of the revulsion 
from the economic life which is involved in religion, we 
cannot speak of the religion of the economic man, because, 
so far as a man has a religion, he must to some extent 
have ceased to be an economic man pure and simple. 
But, as we are often told in a somewhat different connexion, 
the economic man pure and simple does not exist ; and, 
on the other hand, a far larger proportion of the life of those 
who are no strangers to Religion, Science, Art, Morality 
or Politics is as a matter of fact determined by what we 
have designated as economic considerations than some of 
them would perhaps be very willing to admit. 

We may thus speak of the religion of the economic 
man without absurdity if not with perfect correctness. 
For many a man, the main currents of whose life run in 
economic channels, is notwithstanding conscious of a 
need to put himself into accord with the all-con- 
trolling Power in the presence of which, when he 
considers himself and the world in which he lives and 
of which he forms a part, he feels himself to stand. In 
this sense he has, or at any rate seeks after, a religion, 
and that which will satisfy him we shall expect to have 

5 



66 DIVINE PERSONALITY 

the same kind of congruity with and diversity from that 
which satisfies a man who has reached a higher level of 
personal activity as exists between the experience of the 
less and the more advanced stages of other forms of the 
apprehension of Reality by the human mind. But we 
shall also do well to bear in mind the attitude of something 
little short of hostility to the economic life which we have 
seen to be characteristic of the awakening of the religious 
consciousness to the demand of God upon the souL We 
shall not be surprised to find an attempt made to meet 
the need of a religion which, as we have seen, is often felt 
by men whose activities are mainly directed towards 
economic ends, without incurring that breaking up of 
the inward harmony of life, that revolution in general 
outlook, which must be effected before Religion can 
manifest itself within the soul in its proper form. 

We saw in the former course of Lectures that it would 
be an error to identify a personal with an anthropomorphic 
God. We found rather that a thorough-going anthropo- 
morphism was actually incompatible, just because it was 
so thorough-going, with that intimacy of personal inter- 
course which men seek to enjoy with a ' personal ' God. 
Nevertheless such an attempt at a religion as we have now 
in view will usually by vaguely anthropomorphic language 
point forward to the thought of Personality in God, 
while on the other hand it will be apt to keep God as it 
were at a distance, and so be without the power or even 
the will to enter into those closer relations which the 
expression a ' personal God ' is intended to suggest. 

A religion of this kind is exceedingly common as a 
state of mind existing in individual men, but it does not 
easily assume the form of a religious institution. It is 
rather to be observed as a fact of considerable significance 



1 



THE ECONOMIC LIFE 67 

that even among primitive peoples, which seem to regard 
religious practices as in the main instrumental to the 
achievement of economic ends, the whole apparatus of 
initiation, although intended to introduce the sons of 
the tribe to the ordinary duties of mature life, is so designed 
as to suggest a passage into another and more mysterious 
world than that which the eyes of the uninitiated, women 
or boys, daily behold, and in which even the everyday 
actions of the initiated men, those which are open to 
the inspection of their wives and children, are performed. 
Thus one may say that the negative relation between the 
religious and the economic activities is divined by men 
long before they are prepared to acknowledge that in- 
dependence of the ends pursued by the economic activity 
which Religion when it has come to full age vindicates 
for itself. 



LECTURE III 

DIVINE PERSONALITY AND THE SCIENTIFIC 

LIFE 

In this Lecture I propose to pass to the consideration 
of the scientific activity in human Hfe, and to inquire 
what Hght, if any, an examination of the way in which 
our personaHty exhibits itself therein may be found to 
throw upon the doctrine of Divine PersonaHty developed 
in my previous course of Gifford Lectures. This activity 
is of course that the chief products of which are Science, 
in the narrower sense of the word, and Philosophy. 

The difference between these two may be briefly, but, 
for our present purpose, sufficiently, said to lie in this, 
that Philosophy, concerning itself as it does with the 
Whole, totum hoc quod sumus et in quo sumus,^ cannot 
omit from its consideration the knower or the Subject as 
well as the known or the Object ; whereas Science, as 
distinguished from Philosophy, abstracts, in dealing with 
the world of objects, from its relation to the mind which 
knows it. It follows from this characteristic of Science 
that, as I have already, in the first Lecture of my earlier 
course, had occasion to point out, it is precisely in Science, 
thus understood, that Personality seems to be of least 
account. Personality is no doubt a condition of the 
existence of Science ; but Personality is omitted from 
the account which Science gives of its conclusions. Thus 
I Tertullian, adv. Marcionem, i. lo. 



THE SCIENTIFIC LIFE 69 

we see that these can be stated and understood apart 
from any interest in their first discoverer, while the 
work of the artist or philosopher cannot in the same way 
be separated from its spiritual context in the soul of the 
artist or philosopher by whom it was achieved. 

It is thus in harmony with a fundamental feature in 
the nature of Science that the conception of Personality 
in God should seem at the least irrelevant to it, if not 
incongruous with it. There is a well-known story of 
Napoleon that he called the attention of Laplace to the 
absence from the pages of his Mecanique Celeste of any 
mention of God, and that he received from the great 
astronomer this answer : * Sire, I had no need of that 
hypothesis.' Nowadays there would be few, even among 
convinced theists, who would not consider that Laplace 
was right in construing the mechanical system of the 
heavens without reference to a Divine Personality. Such 
a reference would be bound, we think, to be, as Bacon 
long ago hinted,^ barren of results suitable for incorpora- 
tion in the fabric of an exact knowledge of nature, or 
for application to those economic needs of men to which 
such an exact knowledge may be made to minister. 

This being so, we are not surprised to find that, although 
many great men of science have been convinced believers 
in a personal God, the belief which they thus hold is 
not particularly congenial to the scientific temperament. 
Indeed we may suspect that it was often as the traditional 
mode of acknowledging all things to have proceeded not 
from Chance but from Reason that it recommended 
itself to some of those who have maintained it, rather 
than as the expression of a religious experience of intimate 
personal communion with the God whom they acknow- 
? Bacon, de Augm. Sci. iii. 4. 



70 DIVINE PERSONALITY 

ledged to be the ' great first cause ' of the wonderful 
order which they studied. It may, moreover, be observed 
that, in days when the use of theistic language is less 
widely regarded as the only or even as the best way of 
affirming the rationality of the world, it is perhaps the 
mathematicians, astronomers and physicists that have 
been among the men of science least in haste to 
abandon it, just because the subject-matter of their 
studies is so highly abstract that, while testifying to 
the presence of Reason in the world, it has no particular 
suggestion, alternative to the traditional theism, to offer 
as to the mode in which that Reason may be supposed 
to exist and operate. On the other hand it is probably 
the biologists, who have the most concrete subject matter 
to study of any scientific men, that find this same tradi- 
tional theism most uncongenial to their habits of thought. 
Life can make a better shift than Number or Space or 
Motion to take the place of God : and, if we try to think 
of it as taking that place, we shall find that the pheno- 
mena which we regard as the effect of its operation do 
not by any means suggest Personality in their cause ; 
least of all a Personality invested with the attributes, 
customarily ascribed to God, of supreme wisdom and 
goodness. 

It is a thought by this time familiar to us all that 
Nature may with some plausibility be said to bear witness 
to the power of God, and even to his wisdom, if indeed 
we can call that wisdom and not rather cunning which 
does not seem to be inspired at all by goodness ; but 
that, as regards the goodness of God anyone would be 
rash who v/ould rely upon the testimony of Nature to 
establish that . I recognize indeed the force of the reason- 
ing which, from the days of Socrates and Plato onwards, 



THE SCIENTIFIC LIFE 71 

has found in Goodness the only ultimate guarantee of 
that rationality of the world which we must postulate 
if we are to have any Science or any Philosophy at all. 
I beUeve those Fathers of the Christian Church to have 
been in the right who built up the theology which was 
to incorporate their own religious experience upon the 
foundations of the philosophy in whose teaching this 
* great argument ' was central. But I greatly doubt 
whether, apart from some such religious experience as 
theirs of a personal relation to the Supreme Goodness, 
the conviction which that argument could carry to the 
understanding would avail, except it may be with a 
few exceptional souls, to give, in the face of the evil in 
the world, an assurance on which the unquiet heart 
might rest. Where, however, a religious experience of 
this kind is present, then the reasoning which could not 
do its work for it, may well overcome the fear that in 
believing it to be a genuine experience one is merely 
the dupe of a pleasing illusion. 

But while faith in a God with whom personal inter- 
course is possible may be said to be uncongenial to the 
temper of a mind exercised chiefly in scientific activities, 
at any rate under the intellectual conditions of con- 
temporary life, it is to be observed that from the point 
of view of such a faith this very uncongeniality is capable 
of explanation and justification, while from the purely 
scientific point of view the religious experience of personal 
intercourse with God must either remain a riddle or be 
dismissed as illusory. 

Confining our attention for the moment to Science 
in the restricted sense in which we distinguish Science 
from Philosophy, we have already noted in the previous 
course of Lectures those characteristics of its procedure 



72 DIVINE PERSONALITY 

to which it is due that PersonaHty must for ever elude 
its grasp. Its gaze is necessarily fixed upon the objects 
of our knowledge, but the nature and conditions of 
Knowledge itself it cannot scrutinize without ceasing 
to be Science in the narrower signification of the term 
and passing into Philosophy, the concern whereof is not 
merely with the world of objects but with the Whole 
wherein the known is not severed from the knower nor 
the object from the subject. Even in the world of ob- 
jects. Science with its generalizing method can only use 
the individual as a point of departure ; and the Person, 
as the individual subject of knowledge, is doubly un- 
amenable to scientific treatment. Lastly, a personal 
relation to the Supreme Reality, such as is expressed 
in that form of Religion which we have described as 
the highest, is still further removed from the possibility 
of such treatment ; for here Personality is expressly 
contemplated in union with that ultimate nature of 
the Whole which, as we have seen, is the concern of 
Philosophy as distinguished from Science. 

There is thus nothing to excite surprise in the appear- 
ance of irrelevance to the scientific view of the world 
which is sometimes and indeed often felt to attach to 
the thought of a God with whom personal intercourse 
is possible. On the other hand if we start from this 
thought itself we may, as I have already suggested, 
find that this same aversion to it on the part of Science 
may serve as a means of purifying and enriching the 
very conception which Science seems to reject. 

A distinguished theologian of our own days 3 has 

3 Baron F. von Hiigel, Mystical Element in Religion, ii. pp. 380, 
381. On the value to Religion of scientific determinism op. 
Mystical Element in Religion, ii. pp. 374 ff., and the same writer's 
Eternal Life, pp. 133, 388. 



THE SCIENTIFIC LIFE 73 

profoundly observed that the part played in the religious 
life of another age by the ' vision of judgment/ which 
once dominated the imagination of serious men, but has 
now for the great majority, even for those who would 
not deny it all significance, become a symbol of ever 
present moral issues rather than a mode of conceiving 
the ultimate relation of our life to its material environ- 
ment and of this environment to our life — that the part 
once played by this expectation has now to a great extent 
been devolved upon the spectacle presented to us by 
Natural Science of the material universe, extending 
without bounds in space and enduring from eternity to 
eternity, under the reign of inviolable laws whereby 
every detail of its course is conceived to be determined. 
The task thus taken over is that of reducing to insigni- 
ficance and convicting of vanity the everyday life and 
interests of human beings ; and it will probably be ad- 
mitted that this task is likely, at least for those who 
have learned to take seriously to heart the revelations 
of biology, geology, and astronomy, to be more thoroughly 
accomplished by the modern scientific determinism than 
by the old eschatology. 

That it should, however, be performed as efficiently 
as may be is assuredly a matter in which Religion is 
profoundly interested. The feeling which frequently in- 
spires some of the most active hostility encountered by 
religious tradition among us, the feeling that the con- 
ception of God offered to us by that tradition is unworthy 
of the awful majesty, the immeasurable vastness of this 
stupendous universe, whose secrets the devotees of Science 
are ever exploring without any fear of exhausting them — 
this feeling is in a most true sense a religious feeling ; 
and Rehgion, when once it has had this feeling brought 



74 DIVINE PERSONALITY 



i 



home to it, can never be fully content with accepting 
a God to worship, regarding whom a doubt must lurk 
in the hearts of all but his most ignorant worshippers 
whether he is not on a scale, so to speak, quite out of 
proportion to the world with which the natural sciences 
acquaint us, and proportioned only to a picture of that 
world which with the increase of our knowledge we have 
long since outgrown. 

In Science therefore, and in those very characteristics 
of Science which make it take little or no account of 
Personality — and which often arouse on the part of men 
imbued with the scientific temper a sharp opposition to 
Religion itself, Religion comes to recognize an indis- 
pensable helper in the work of enlarging her own con- 
ceptions to match the demands of that aspiration after 
the Highest and nothing short of the Highest which is 
the mainspring of her own activity. 

In what I have just said I have not suggested that 
a reverent attitude towards the vastness of the material 
universe is other than reasonable. I have even affirmed 
it to be religious. It must, however, not be forgotten 
that there are those who would regard this attitude itself 
as mistaken and as the result of an illusion. According 
to the maxim which Sir William Hamilton took as thai 
motto of his philosophy : — 



On earth there is nothing great but man. 
In man there is nothing great but mind. 



Man, as Pascal says,4 may be as frail as a reed, but 
he is a reed that thinks, and so is greater than the un- 
thinking universe, by which he can so easily be crushed. 

4 Pensees, ed. Faugere ii. 84, ed. Brunschvig ii. 262. 



THE SCIENTIFIC LIFE 75 

Rank in the scale of values, it may be pointed out, must 
not be measured by the space occupied or the time out- 
lasted ; else the whale or the tortoise would be higher 
among animals than the human being. Nay, to Hegel 5 
even the infinity of Space and Time themselves had 
nothing dreadful about it but its tediousness. 

It is not irrelevant to our present subject to inquire 
where the truth lies in this matter. It seems difficult 
to deny the justice of the assertion that mere bigness 
and mere continuance in time are qualities in themselves 
unfitted to excite our reverence. On the other hand it 
is no less difficult to deny that both at least contribute 
to the sublimity of objects w^hich we should generally 
allow to be sublime, for example the starry heaven. 
We remember how Kant ^ reckoned this as one of the 
two things — the Moral Law being the other — which 
inspired his own mind with a feeling of solemn awe ; 
and assuredly he never said anything that awakened a 
wider and readier response in all who possess any capacity 
for such a sentiment. The Psalmist was moved long ago 
by this same spectacle to cry out to him whom he sup- 
posed to be its maker and his own : " What is man, 
that thou art mindful of him ? or the son of man, that thou 
visitest him ? " 7 And it would be strange if we, who 
have a juster conception than the Psalmist could have 
of the immensity and remoteness of the celestial bodies 
and of the countless ages through which they have en- 
dured, did not for that very reason feel with far greater 
poignancy that insignificance of ours in their presence 
of which he thus speaks. 

5 Logik, § 94 {Werke, vi. 184 f.). 

^ Kant, Kritik dev prakt. Vernunft, i Th. Beschluss. {Werke, 
ed. Hartenstein v. p. 167). 7 Ps. viii. 4. 



76 DIVINE PERSONALITY 

We must, notwithstanding, observe that with him it 
is not, strictly speaking, towards them, but towards the 
Being the work of whose fingers he took them to be, 
that the awe excited by the sight of them was directed. 
Again, there are others — Plato and Aristotle, for instance — 
whom we know to have been profoundly impressed with 
a sense of the superiority of the stars to ourselves and who 
did not (at any rate in Aristotle's case) believe them to 
be the handiwork of a Creator but rather eternal in their 
own right. By Plato and Aristotle, however, they were 
regarded as themselves divine or perhaps rather as mani- 
festing the presence of divine beings possessed of an 
intelligence far more exalted than our own. It is at 
any rate worth inquiring whether those among ourselves 
who neither believe them to be creatures of God nor 
attribute to them a superhuman intelligence are not in 
their reverent attitude towards them secretly influenced 
by associations belonging rather to these older doctrines 
than to the Naturalism which they consciously profess. 

The heavenly bodies are among all the objects of our 
senses unquestionably (though not, it is true, to our 
senses themselves but to our knowledge) the biggest, 
the most remote and the most enduring. Yet, if I 
am right in my suggestion, the sentiment which even 
these inspire in us is not in truth due to those charac- 
teristics taken by themselves, but involves at least a 
subconscious recollection, if I may so express it, of a 
personification with which the immemorial language, not 
only of poetic literature but of that far more widely 
spread kind of poetry which is implicit in popular legend 
and fancy and seems almost instinctive in our race, 
has made us all familiar, however firmly we may 
be convinced of its scientific falsity. When we come to 



THE SCIENTIFIC LIFE 77 

any other things than these, whose bigness or distance 
or long continuance seems to impress us with a sense 
of awe in the contemplation of them, we are at once 
struck with the fact that this impressive bigness, distance, 
or long continuance is a purely relative quality. St. 
Peter's at Rome is imposing from its vastness as a temple 
made with hands ; but a mountain of the same size 
would be of small account ; nor do we cease to be capable 
of a 

vague emotion of delight 
In gazing up an Alpine height, ^ 

because we are well aware of the insignificant proportion 
which is borne even by the highest peaks to the circum- 
ference of the terrestrial globe, itself but a grain of dust 
compared with the mighty systems of orbs unimaginably 
huge, to one of which it is an inconsiderable sateUite. 

In the same way we may be deeply moved by the 
venerable antiquity of a church many centuries younger 
than a time which from another point of view we should 
never think of calling ancient ; and our reverent con- 
templation of the oldest works of men is not, I think, 
seriously disturbed by a contrast of the comparatively 
short period during which our race has existed on the 
earth with the vista of immense ages spread out before 
us by geology and astronomy. 

These considerations may, I think, lead us reasonably 
to suspect that the awe excited in us by what is big and 
what is old is not in fact due to bigness and oldness in 
themselves, but to these, if at all, only in connexion 
with a scale quite different from the scale of mere quan- 
tity, whether it be quantity of space or of time. 
8 Tennyson, The Two Voices. 



78 DIVINE PERSONALITY 

Our suspicion may receive support from the reflection 
that the LiUiputians did not worship the man-mountain,9 
nor does the thought of the " monstrous eft '' ^^ that, 
says the poet, " was of old the lord and master of earth," 
arouse in us a sentiment of reverential awe. And where- 
ever this sentiment is found, I am much inclined to think 
that we shall find that we are imaginatively investing 
its object, if not with personality, at least with attributes 
which properly belong to persons. 

The ancient building or tree, the mountain or ocean 
or planet is conceived as having watched many genera- 
tions and as made wise by the gathered experience of long 
centuries. Even where (as I think is generally the case 
with Wordsworth) it is an essential feature of our senti- 
ment for the natural objects, hills or woods or sea, which 
stand out as especially embodying the majesty which 
belongs to Nature as a whole, that we do not regard them 
as human, but rather as composing and solemnizing us 
by their very remoteness from — we may go so far as to 
say their indifference to — our desires and troubles, our 
passions and regrets — even there it is of ' presences of 
Nature in the sky And on the earth,' " of 'a presence 
that disturbs us with the joy Of elevated thoughts ' " 
that the poet who has most deeply felt and most nobly 
expressed the sentiment is led to speak. Nor would it, 
I believe, have been otherwise, had the contemplation 
of these ' powers ' filled him, as it has spirits less happily 
tempered, not with solemn joy and consolation but with 
terror and despair ; nay, had he even, hke the preacher 



9 Swift, Voyage to Lilliput. 

10 Tennyson, Maud, iv, 6. 

11 Wordsworth, Prelude, I. 464-5. 

12 Wordsworth, Lines composed a Few Miles above Tintern Abbey. 



THE SCIENTIFIC LIFE 79 

in the cathedral of the City of Dreadful Night, seen in 
Nature nothing but 

Necessity Supreme, 
With infinite Mystery, abysmal, dark, 
Unlighted even by the faintest spark, 
For us the flitting shadows of a dream. ^ 3 

So long, at least, as this sombre mood is mixed, as 
so often it is, with a sense of solemn awe, it must be 
that we still feel ourselves in a presence, though it be a 
presence that disturbs us with feehngs very different 
from the joy of which Wordsworth speaks in the Unes 
which I have just quoted. 

It is also to be observed that those in whom the 
deepest emotions of awe and reverence are aroused by 
the contemplation of the immeasurable universe which 
surrounds us and its wonderful order, and who feel most 
acutely the jarring incongruity with the majesty of that 
spectacle of a religion which would see in it the expression 
of an intelhgence like that which in themselves (as they 
would say) is conscious of its fleeting httleness in com- 
parison with the subhmities confronting it, are not com- 
i monly devoid of a reverence no less genuine for the 
I intellectual greatness of those whose genius has opened 
I the eyes of their fellows to these same marvels. But 
I this latter reverence really contradicts, not indeed the 
j other reverence for Nature, but the disparagement of 
i the human spirit which it is often supposed to entail. 
j That disparagement rests indeed upon a confusion between 
the weak and perishable frame which is an infinitesimal 
part of the material universe and the mind which so 
astonishingly transcends the Umitations of its original 
13 J. Thomson, City of Dreadful Night, § 14. 



80 DIVINE PERSONALITY 

point of view by discounting and allowing for them in 
its miraculous ascent to the apprehension of laws valid 
for " all time and all existence." ^4 It is not the bigness 
of Nature in comparison with the human body or its 
long continuance in comparison with human life which 
enables it to excite our reverence ; it is rather the per- 
petual challenge which it makes to the intellect and the 
imagination of man, by which if they may sometimes 
confess themselves baffled, they are baffled not as they 
would be by nonsense and chaos, but as by a problem, 
which must have a solution, though it be hard to find. 
Did we regard the mystery of things as a riddle like that 
famous one which was propounded at the mad tea party 
about the Raven and the Writing Desk,i5 we should 
entertain towards it not a feeling of reverent awe, but one 
of a quite opposite character. 

Although the aspect of things with which the exercise 
of the scientific activity which we have been considering 
makes us acquainted may seem incongruous with the 
thought of Divine Personality, yet that same activity, 
if we turn our attention from its results to itself, is 
assuredly a fact extremely difficult of explanation from 
the principles of Naturalism. Known to us only as a 
manifestation of Personality, it reveals to us the spirit 
of man as conversant with the Eternal and the Infinite, 
and as finding a progressive satisfaction in the exploration 
of Nature just because there seems no end to the questions 
which may be asked and answered concerning it. The 
man of science is uplifted rather than depressed by the 
thought which brought sadness to the great pessimist 
of the Old Testament as he meditated on the " travail 
which God hath given to the sons of men to be exercised 
M Plato, Rep., vi, 486 a. ^S Alice in Wonderland, c. 7. 



THE SCIENTIFIC LIFE 81 

in it," i6 and the thought that '' he hath set eternity in 
their heart " — a sense of the infinite, as we might put 
it — " yet so that man cannot find out the work that 
God hath done from the beginning to the end." Shall 
we be going far astray if we suggest that nothing but a 
manifestation of Personal Spirit could thus inspire the 
sentiment of reverential awe in the mind while in the 
very act of demonstrating by its scientific activity its 
own unique dignity ; since to nothing less than Personal 
Spirit can Personal Spirit without loss of self-respect 
render the homage that the entertainment of that senti- 
ment implies ? 

I do not think that we should be going far astray in 
making such a suggestion ; but I am well aware that 
the rejoinder will readily occur to many that not to be 
less than Personal Spirit is not the same as to be Personal 
Spirit ; that it is consistent with being more than Personal 
Spirit. This possibility I will shortly examine more 
closely when I have passed to the consideration of that 
other form of the cognitive activity which we nowadays 
call Philosophy rather than Science. But I am, I confess, 
exceedingly doubtful whether the attempt to think of 
the " Infinite and Eternal Energy from which all things 
proceed " (to quote Herbert Spencer's famous description 
of the God of Science ^7) as lacking Personality does 
not after all, while it unquestionably helps us to put 
aside certain problems which would puzzle us, if we were 
to ascribe personality to it, at the same time, in the 
apprehension of most of those who find it more to their 
liking than the traditional language of Religion, which 
calls it God, recall rather something which — like elec- 
tricity, or the ether, or unconscious life — we should in 

i6 Eccl. iii. II. ^7 Ecclesiastical Institutions, p. 843. 

6 



82 DIVINE PERSONALITY 

other connexions have no hesitation in ranking helow 
PersonaUty. When the thought of it excites — as we 
cannot doubt that it excited in Herbert Spencer himself — 
a reverential awe, we find that the language used of it 
at once approximates to that which is appropriate to a 
Person. ** We find ourselves," says Spencer, " in the 
presence of an Infinite and Eternal Energy, from which all 
things proceed." 

I am far from desiring to press overmuch an argument 
which might seem to be based upon the inevitably meta- 
phorical character of the only language which we have 
to use. I do not think that Science, taken by itself, can 
assure us of Divine Personality. The only satisfactory 
evidence of that lies, as the only satisfactory proof of 
Personality in our fellow men lies, in personal intercourse. 
I have already insisted in my earlier course that by no 
reflection which abstracts from the religious experience 
can we reach the God of Religion. 

But we may notwithstanding call the nature of the 
sentiment excited by the spectacle of the world in many 
men of science towards the mysterious Power from which 
it has its unity an evidence that the revelation of Reli- 
gion is not altogether incongruous with the mood of 
Science. At the same time we may remember that the 
history of Natural Theology ^^ has ever been the history 
of a discrimination between the anthropomorphism which 
would be justly exposed to the scoffs of Xenophanes as 
likening God to man as a particular sort of animal, no 
otherwise than a lion might liken him to a lion or a horse 
to a horse,i9 and that other anthropomorphism (if it is 
so to be called) which finds in man's mind and reason 

i8 See Studies in the History of Natural Theology, pp. 79 ff. 
19 Cp. Rupert Brooke's Fish. 



THE SCIENTIFIC LIFE 83 

a credible witness to the presence of a royal intelligence 
(as Plato speaks) in the nature of Zeus.^o For, this being 
so, we may gladly accept the help of Science to purify 
our notions of the Divine Nature by making us slow to 
indulgence in fancies which the personal relation to God 
experienced in Religion might have seemed to authorize, 
but which are felt to be out of place, when we consider 
that the God whom we know by faith is also — if he be 
God indeed — the ' veiled being,' 21 the ' Deus absconditus,' 22 
— a part of whose ways it is the inexhaustible task and 
joy of the votaries of Science to discover. 

But, as we saw, Science, in that narrower sense of the 
word in which we distinguish it from Philosophy, is not 
the only form which the scientific activity assumes ; 
there is also Philosophy, in that sense, more fully estab- 
lished in modern times than formerly, in which we contrast 
it with what we describe as specifically Science. It is 
with those problems which Science leaves on one side, 
in order to concentrate its energies on the investigation 
of the objects which surround us in the world which 
the senses apprehend — though that very investigation 
certainly leads us far beyond what the senses can appre- 
hend, — with the problem of the nature of that which is the 
subject of Science and not its object, and the problem of the 
Unity which is implied in the fact of Knowledge wherein 
things are objects to a subject — with just those problems 
it is that Philosophy, strictly so called, occupies itself. 

How then does the scientific activity of the human 
spirit in the form of Philosophy stand toward the recog- 
nition of Personality in God ? 

ao Philebus, 30 d. *i H. G. Wells, God the Invisible King. 

22 Isa. xlv. 15. Cp. Pascal, Pensees, ed. Brunschvig ii. loi, 
177, ed. Faugere ii. 114, 146. 



84 DIVINE PERSONALITY 

It is, I think, a common impression that the study 
of Philosophy tends towards Pantheism ; an expression 
which, in its popular acceptation, is understood to describe 
a view, agreeing with Theism as against Atheism in the 
recognition of an object of worship, while agreeing with 
Atheism against Theism in the denial to that object 
of worship of the attribute of Personality. Such common 
impressions are usually worth noting, and more often 
than not contain a kernel of true apprehension, which 
however needs much examination and sifting before 
it can be made available for incorporation in a reasoned 
view of the world. In the present case, we need not 
spend many words on the alleged tendency of Philosophy 
to reject mere Atheism. The aversion to this word which 
will be found to be general among philosophers is not 
wholly to be explained by the evil associations which 
it has gathered about it. It is true that in our own 
time as in others some thinkers who are deserving of all 
respect have not refused or have even claimed for them- 
selves the designation of Atheist. For example Dr. 
M'Taggart 23 considers merely misleading the use of the 
word ' God,' except for a being conceived not merely 
as personal but as a finite person side by side with other 
persons, although no doubt vastly more powerful and 
good than any other ; and so, as he sees no reason 
to believe in the existence of any such being, he 
has declared himself content to be described as an 
Atheist. Yet since for him the ultimate reality in 
the world is a spiritual unity, an eternal society of 
eternal individual spirits, his view, no less than that 
of most other philosophers, would probably appear 
to the ' man in the street ' — or, shall we rather say, 
2? Some Dogmas of Religion, §§ 152 ff. (pp. 186 ff.). 



THE SCIENTIFIC LIFE 85 

to the ordinary journalist ? — to fall under the head of 
Pantheism. 

There are no doubt other thinkers — I would mention, 
among our own contemporaries, Mr. Bertrand Russell — 
whose doctrine the same critic from outside the schools 
of philosophy would consider fairly entitled to be called 
Atheism, since it not only leaves us with no object for 
worship, but forbids us that satisfied acquiescence which 
Dr. MTaggart leaves to us in the supreme and ultimate 
reality of things which, if it cannot properly be called 
worship, may at least be described without absurdity 
as a beatific vision. Such philosophies of pessimism — 
to use another term in popular use — have, however, at 
any rate in the past, been in a very decided minority ; 
and the impression that, speaking generally, Atheism is 
not the favourite attitude of Philosophy receives support 
from the facts of history. And the same facts undoubtedly 
give considerable ground for the suggestion that Philo- 
sophy has favoured on the whole a way of thinking which 
subordinates and ignores or even denies the notion of 
Divine Personality — a way of thinking such as is fre- 
quently, though not always accurately, described as 
Pantheism. 

It has been already observed in my former course that 
while the personality of the man of Science is of course 
a condition of the results of his activity, yet those results 
may be and indeed should be stated in a form which 
abstracts altogether from that personality ; but that, 
on the other hand, a similar abstraction cannot be made 
in Philosophy ; so that it is not possible to study with 
profit the doctrines of the great philosophers, as one 
may the discoveries and hypotheses of the great men 
of science, elsewhere than in their original context. 



86 DIVINE PERSONALITY 

If this be so, if the philosophical form of what I have 
called as a whole the scientific activity of the human 
spirit is thus so far more intimately affected by the indi- 
vidual personality of the agent than that other form to 
which the name of Science is more particularly appro- 
priated ; and if moreover the very mission of Philosophy, 
as the contemplation of the Whole, of Absolute Reality, 
forbids her to pass over any feature of experience, least 
of all one so important as Personality, as being no concern 
of hers ; it is plainly impossible, when we find a tendency 
in Philosophy to think of God otherwise than as personal, 
to explain it as we did a like tendency in Science by the 
limitations requisite to its concentration on the per- 
formance of a special task, such as was for Science the 
exploration of the objective world. 24 

Philosophy is bound to take account of Personality. 
It cannot neglect the presuppositions of its own activity, 
and Personality is at least one of these. Again it cannot 
neglect any region of experience, neither that of personal 
intercourse between man and man, nor that of religious 
experience, which, as we know, often takes the form of 
a consciousness of personal intercourse. 

But, as was pointed out in the tenth Lecture of my 
previous course, Philosophy stands to Religion in a 



34 I describe the task of Science thus, notwithstanding I may 
seem to some who hear me thereby to imply that Psychology 
is not a Science ; for I think that Psychology, so far as it is more 
than a branch of Physiology, must be reckoned rather with such 
philosophical disciplines devoted to the investigation of the human 
spirit as Ethics, Esthetics, Logic, than with the Mathematical 
and Natural Sciences, of which in our modern use of the word 
Science we are mainly thinking. Although these disciplines are 
departmental as compared with Metaphysics, they yet involve 
a conception of the whole in a sense in which the mathematical 
and natural sciences by themselves do not. 



THE SCIENTIFIC LIFE 87 

peculiar relation in which she stands to no other of the 
several forms of human experience, all of which it is her 
office to survey. For Religion has, in a sense in which 
this cannot be said of any other form of experience, the 
same object as Philosophy itself. Hence Philosophy 
finds in Religion a rival or competitor, and indeed his- 
torically a competitor which is already in possession 
when she herself enters upon the field. For indeed it 
is in the soil of Religion that as a rule Philosophy springs 
up, and before she has differentiated herself from Religion, 
ReUgion both in the individual and in the race discharges 
functions which, when fully developed. Philosophy must 
take over. 25 It is in this situation that we must look 
for the true explanation of the tendency in Philosophy 
to represent God after what is called a pantheistic manner, 
or, to use a phraseology already adopted in these Lectures, 
to dwell upon his immanence to the exclusion of his trans- 
cendence. 

ReHgion, not only in what, as we have seen, is the rare 
although highly developed form in which explicit stress 
is laid upon Personality in God himself, but always, is 
an experience of God as in direct relation to our whole 
individual personality, or at least to a social personality 
within which we feel ourselves to be included, and is 
thus distinguished from the purely cognitive attitude 
towards the supreme Reality which is proper to Philo- 
sophy. Thus, although Religion is never really an 
experience of a God merely transcendent, there is always 
in the experience an element which we may describe as 
the consciousness of his transcendence, and which at its 
fullest and highest becomes a consciousness of Divine 
Personality. So long therefore as Philosophy respects 
25 Cp. my History of Philosophy, p. 80. 



88 DIVINE PERSONALITY 

Religion as an autonomous form of experience, it cannot 
ignore this characteristic of it, and must take account of 
it in its own conception of the Supreme ReaHty. Where 
Philosophy becomes a doctrine of divine immanence 
and as such calls in question the reality of the trans- 
cendence implied in the attitude of worship proper to 
Religion, it is really attempting to substitute itself for 
Religion ; and this is just what Signor Croce, for example, 
would, as we have already seen, have it do. But such 
an explicit substitution, or even an attitude towards 
Religion which implies as much, does in fact tend to the 
impoverishment of human life, and incidentally makes 
for the disparagement of the human personality which 
attains its true dignity in the religious experience of per- 
sonal intercourse with God. 

It is quite consistent in Signor Croce to dismiss con- 
temptuously the belief in the immortality of the individual 
soul and that in the existence of a transcendent God 
together as by no means corresponding to profound 
demands of the human spirit.^^ Jhis belief in individual 
immortality we shall hereafter have to consider on its 
own merits ; but even if, on other grounds, we should 
find ourselves forced to abandon it in its traditional form, 
on the principles of Signor Croce the position of the 
individual person in the world is strangely enigmatic. 
The arrogance of the tone in which this writer speaks 
of views which he considers outworn should not disguise 
from us the difficulties inherent in all theories which, 
like his, attribute deity to the Spirit which is in us and 
which we are [Dens in nobis et nos ^7) , while regarding 
the only form in which this divine Spirit is conscious 

a6 Filosofia delta Pratica, Eng. tr. p. 261. 

-7 Croce, Saggio sullo Hegel (ed. 1913), p. 137 (Eng. tr. p. 201). 



THE SCIENTIFIC LIFE 89 

of its own reality, the form, that is, of individual per- 
sonality, as something essentially transient and perishable. 
That attempts to escape from these difficulties by assign- 
ing to individual personality a ' value and destin}^ ' such 
as is accorded to them by the traditional theology of 
Christendom are beset by grave difficulties of their own 
must be frankly admitted. But for the present it is 
sufficient to point out that by recognizing, as, in my 
judgment, she is bound to do, that Religion is a genuine 
and autonomous form of experience. Philosophy leaves 
open to herself a chance of profiting by any light which 
may be thrown upon this problem by the religious experi- 
ence of personal intercourse with the Supreme Reality. 
This experience Philosophy cannot indeed create from 
her own resources, any more than she can thus create 
any other form of experience, except that of reflexion, 
which is the experience of her own specific activity ; 
but neither can she without prejudice to success in her 
own task refrain from taking it into account in displaying 
the mutual relations of that manifold spiritual experience 
of w^hich in its entirety it is her office to be the inter- 
preter.^'^ 

28 It has been pointed out to me that in the discussions of this 
chapter I may seem to have ignored historical science. For my 
special purpose, however, since the object of history may be said 
to be the economic, ethical, political and religious activities of 
mankind, what is said elsewhere respecting these activities will 
serve also for this department of science, in which no doubt the 
impulse to know is no less manifested than in natural science or in 
philosophy. 



LECTURE IV 



DIVINE PERSONALITY AND THE ESTHETIC 

LIFE 

We pass from the scientific to the aesthetic activity of 
the human spirit. This activity is displayed both in 
the creation of works of Art and also in the pleasure 
taken in the beauty whether of such works or of Nature. 
These various manifestations of the activity we are now 
to consider are not so heterogeneous as the description 
of them just given might at first suggest. In our appre- 
ciation of works of Art our imagination is stimulated 
by them to reproduce, although in a fainter and weaker 
fashion, the activity which created them ; and in the 
delight which we take in the beauty of Nature, there is 
an activity which expresses itself in the perception of 
this beauty where a Peter Bell, for the lack of such an 
activity, perceives nothing of the sort ; an activity of 
the same kind, though at a lower level, as that which 
in a Turner or a Wordsworth creates a great landscape 
painting or a great descriptive poem.^ 

It might perhaps be thought that the conception of 
Divine Personality would be especially congenial to the 
human mind when engaged in this particular form of 
spiritual activity. For even those who would deny to 

I The debt which this account of the aesthetic activity owes 
to Signor Croce will be obvious to those acquainted with his .Esthetic. 

90 



THE ESTHETIC LIFE 91 

this conception any scientific value would often allow to 
it an imaginative one ; and the aesthetic activity would 
seem to be pre-eminently one of the Imagination. 

Yet it will on closer attention be found that the artist 
is indeed ready to use the conception for his own purpose, 
if it be expressly recognized as a product of Imagination 
and as free for him to manipulate as he will ; but, if it 
be granted an independent and objective validity, he is 
apt to regard it as suggestive of a tyrannical Power, 
cruelly or fiendishly denying its rights to that impulse 
of self-expression which is his very life and holier to him 
than any repressive law can possibly be. This matter 
can, I am disposed to think, be nowhere better studied 
than in the works of Blake, enigmatical as they are, 
sometimes even to the very bounds of sanity or beyond 
them. For few, if any, artists have combined with 
genius so powerful in the creation of beauty a religious 
mysticism for all its obscurity and wilfulness so profound 
and original as that of this singular poet and painter, 
neglected in his own day, but now acknowledged as a 
prophet of much that is most stirring and challenging 
in the thought and temper of the present generation. 
I make for myself no claim for any special scholarship 
in this sphere. I do not pretend to have more than a 
vague and general acquaintance with his intricate myth- 
ology ; I must confess that there is much in the ' Pro- 
phetical Books ' which fails to convey any definite meaning 
to my mind. Nevertheless I will venture a few observa- 
tions suggested by my reading of this strange master, 
which it seems to me may throw some light on the subject 
of my present Lecture. 

We may say that Blake is at once boldly anthropo- 
morphic in his representations of God and frankly hostile 



92 DIVINE PERSONALITY 

to the thought of a God external and remote, especially 
when such a God is represented after the fashion favoured 
by the theology of the eighteenth century as the Author 
of Nature and the Moral Governor of man.^ It is note- 
worthy that of all the mighty figures of his mythology 
none is, as it seems to me, so clearly drawn, none stands 
out as a living person with a character of his own so 
distinctly as Urizen, who symbolizes precisely this, to 
Blake, hateful aspect of Divinity. If the artist is often 
repelled by the thought of a ' personal God,' it is, I suspect, 
because he is apt, like Blake, to suppose that what the 
orthodox religious world has in view when urging the 
claims of that thought upon him is a Being of this kind, 
gloomy and inexorable, a foe to joy and to all that is 
impulsive and childlike, whose kingdom, whether in 
nature or in human life, is a ' reign of law,' enforced by 
terrible penalties ; one who (so Blake at least is con- 
vinced) must himself be no less unhappy than he makes 
all who are subject to his sway. 

But Urizen is only one of the beings among whom 
Blake distributes the various aspects under which men 
have envisaged the Object of their worship. And here 
we come upon another feature of his theology, in which 
he is decidedly representative of a general bent of artists 
in this regard, namely his leaning towards polytheism. 
Now in this leaning towards polytheism the religious 
tendency engendered by the aesthetic activity is in marked 
contrast with that engendered by the scientific. Philo- 
sophy in all countries is found to speak of God or the 
Godhead in the singular, even where the popular religion 
is polytheistic, and whether the philosopher himself 

2 * Maker of all things. Judge of all men/ as the Confession 
n the Anglican Communion Service has it. 



t 



THE ESTHETIC LIFE 93 

adopts towards that religion a hostile, an indifferent, or 
a patronizing attitude. And, in my first course of Lec- 
tures, when tracing the history of the attribution of 
Personality to God, I had occasion to point out how the 
great advance in the knowledge of the system of Nature 
which distinguished the period illustrated by the names 
di Galileo and Newton so greatly impressed men's minds 
with the unity of the Divine Source of that system as 
decidedly to encourage a Unitarian tendency in the 
religious thought of contemporary Christendom. 

In sharp contradiction to this scientific monotheism 
stands the attractive force so constantly exercised upon 
poets and artists living under the shadow of a religion 
which has adopted the confession of the divine unity 
as its primary article of faith by the memories of an older 
day, when the imagination could delight itself among the 
*' fair humanities of old religion " 3 unsaddened by 
the thought that they were unreal, and unchecked by 
the fear that they might be held to be profane. The 
long tradition, subsiding at times into a frigid convention, 
which has kept alive in European poetry and art the 
names and attributes of the Greek and Roman gods is 
in itself a witness to this regretful retrospect in the souls 
of those who have clung to it ; and in our own national 
literature, since the great revival of poetry at the end 
of the eighteenth century, not a few of the chief masters, 
a Wordsworth, a Coleridge, a Shelley, a Keats — to name 
no others — have given memorable expression to the 
sentiment. 4 

3 Coleridge, Piccolomini, ii. 4. 

4 See Wordsworth, ' The world is too much with us,' etc., and 
Excursion, iv. 847 ff. ; Coleridge, Piccolomini, ii. 4 ; Shelley, Hellas 
(final chorus) ; Keats everywhere ; see esp. Dedication of Poems 
to Leigh Hunt, ' I stood tiptoe,' etc. ; Endymion, i. 307 ff. ; Ode 
to Psyche. 



94 DIVINE PERSONALITY 



lerifl 



The instinctive revulsion of the artistic temperameri 
from the austerity of a strict monotheism should have 
been familiar enough to philosophic students of religion 
to prevent them from being startled, as I fear some of 
us were, when the late William James, 5 with charac- 
teristic disregard of tradition, suggested that there was 
something to be said on philosophical grounds in favour 
of a recognition of " Gods many." What seems to have 
attracted James in polytheism was indeed the spirit 
of adventure, congenial to his personal temperament, 
which it appeared to him to call for in the man who 
committed himself to the care of one out of many gods 
thus to cut himself adrift from the chance of availing 
himself of the help of another in time of need. " If 
there be different gods, each caring for his part," he 
observes, " some portion of some of us might not be 
covered with divine protection, and our religious conso- 
lations would thus fail to be complete." This objec- 
tion to polytheism did not in his eyes put it out of 
court. " For," as he says, " no fact in human nature 
is more characteristic than its willingness to live on a 
chance." 

To pursue the more general question thus raised would, 
however, take us too far from our immediate subject 
of the religious attitude induced by the aesthetic activity 
of the human spirit. I will only take occasion to remark 
that James had not failed to perceive the true ethical 
and religious significance of the issue between monotheism 
and polytheism. This is already clearly pointed out by 
St. Thomas Aquinas in his Summa contra Gentiles A It 

5 Varieties of Religious Experience, p. 526. 

6 Summa contra Gentiles, i. 42. See my Studies in the History 
of Natural Theology, pp. 243, 258 ; cp. p 104. 



THE ESTHETIC LIFE 95 

is not the mere number of those to whom the name ' God ' 
is appHed that is principally in question. Belief in a 
host of beings called Gods under a single supreme chief 
is compatible with a theology essentially monotheistic. 
What is not so compatible is a doctrine, like that of the 
Manichean dualism which in St. Thomas's own day was 
the most dangerous speculative opponent of Christianity 
in Western Europe — a doctrine which would leave us 
with two ultimate and eternal Principles opposed the 
one to the other as good to evil, thus opening up to the 
soul of man a choice of sovereignties, to either of which 
allegiance may with equal reasonableness be sworn, and 
under either of which a career is open to spiritual 
ambition. 

That in Blake we have a representative of the artistic 
temperament, as in other respects, so in this particular 
respect of a tendency towards polytheism in religion, 
we have already seen. With him, however, the tendency 
did not take the form, as with Wordsworth, of a yearning 
after, or, as with Keats, of a resuscitation to new life of ''the 
beautiful mythology of Greece." 7 He had taken indeed 
a great dislike to the whole classical tradition as being 
responsible for the fetters which the Age of Reason seemed 
to have cast upon the limbs of the Imagination. *' The 
Stolen and Perverted Writings of Homer and Ovid, of 
Plato and Cicero, which all men ought to condemn, are 
set up by artifice against the Sublime of the Bible." So 
begins the Preface to his Milton. This may seem a strange 
saying with which to introduce a book the hero whereof 
is the glorified spirit of the English poet who of all others 
drank most deeply of the Greek and Roman fountains 
of inspiration. But the author was not unaware of the 
7 Preface to Endymion. 



96 DIVINE PERSONALITY 

paradox ; for he held it to be a fault in Milton that he 
had submitted himself so much to influences that to 
Blake seemed perverse and profane. For his own part 
Blake turns aside from them altogether. 

Nor does he, despite the singular nationalism which 
leads him to insist so much upon the fancy that 

All Things Begin and End in Albion's Ancient Druid Rocky Shore, 8 

seek for a mythology ready to his hand which might 
be identified with that of the ancient inhabitants of his 
own country, as Morris resorted to the Norse Eddas or 
Wagner to the Nibelungenlied ; though it must be ad- 
mitted that the nomenclature of his prophetic books 
owes something to the pseudo-Ossian, who passed with 
those who accepted his pretensions as the British ana- 
logue of Homer. On the Bible, which he held to be the 
true source of the Sublime, Blake indeed drew for much 
of his material ; but in the sacred books of a monotheistic 
faith it was not possible to find fully developed a myth- 
ology adequate to his purpose ; and he was thus thrown i| 
back upon the resources of his own invention. 

This is not the place, even if I were competent, to 
enter upon a detailed, still less a critical description of 
the mysterious world which revealed itself to the inward 
vision of the poet-painter, and in which he lived a life 
of intense experience which included and interpreted 
for him the outward events, trivial and commonplace 
as they must have seemed in the eyes of his neighbours, 
which make up the story of his earthly life. I can 
pretend to do no more than call attention to certain 
features of his mythology which may prove instructive 
to us in the pursuit of our present inquiry. 
8 Blake, Jerusalem, i. 27-9. 



THE .ESTHETIC LIFE 97 

At first sight Blake's polytheism undoubtedly suggests 
that it is a genuine polytheism of the type that, as St. 
Thomas insists, is more opposed to the Christian faith 
in the unity of God than any which, like the polytheism 
found by the Angelic Doctor in Plato's Timceus, makes 
one Supreme Deity the Master and Creator of the rest. 
There is division and strife among the Beings whom Blake 
calls ' the Eternals ' ; and he not unfrequently uses 
language which suggests an ultimate plurality of Divine 
Beings with no supreme unity except what may arise 
from the concord and co-operation of these. 

Nevertheless it would be, I think, an error to regard 
his mythology as the symbol of a doctrine fundamentally 
at variance, in the same sense as the Manichean dualism, 
with the doctrine of the unity of God as asserted 
by Christianity. Other poets, as we have seen, in 
turning away from a monotheism which they had 
no intention of seriously rejecting, to forget it for 
the moment in an imaginative reversion to '* a creed 
outworn," found in the legends of classical antiquity 
an opportunity for a freer exercise of the imagina- 
tion than was possible to them in dealing with themes 
which would perhaps lend themselves less readily to 
variation and elaboration and would certainly be con- 
sidered by their readers, if not by themselves, as too 
sacred to admit of such treatment. Blake, who held 
himself for a veritable prophet, and could say in all 
sincerity, " Mark well my words ! They are of your 
eternal salvation ! " 9 could not take a like course. The 
polytheistic imagery which he, no less than they, found 
congenial to the inventive spontaneity of his genius he 
must bring, if he was to use it at all, into the closest 

9 Blake, Milton, 3. 25. 
7 



98 DIVINE PERSONALITY 

connexion with his deepest religious and philosophical 
convictions. Consequently one is not tempted, as in 
the case of other poets one may be tempted, to think 
of it as a mere play of fancy, committing him to no denial 
of the article that God is one. Nevertheless, though 
one is doubtless right in not thus dismissing it as no 
evidence for his real belief, our very reason for taking 
it seriously is also a reason for taking no less seriously 
the monotheistic language which we also find him using 
on occasion. The " Divine Family " of which he some- 
times speaks is several times represented as appearing 
not as many but as one man, often described as * Jesus 
the Saviour.* ^o Without pursuing the subject further, 
I will content myself with saying that I think we shall 
come nearest to the truth if we think of Blake's polythe- 
ism in the light of the theosophical speculations (which 
we know him to have studied) of the sixteenth-century 
German mystic Jacob Behmen. The god-like forms 
whom he presents to us as mutually distinct and even 
mutually opposed I take him to have regarded rather 
as spiritual Principles which though, when severed from 
the unity of the Divine Life, they appear thus as diverse 
and conflicting elements in the process of the world's 
history, yet find their *' perfect consummation and bliss " " 
only in the realization of their true and eternal nature 
as integral factors of that Supreme Unity. 

We have now to inquire into the relation between 
Blake's representations of God in a human form or forms 

10 We also hear from time to time of ' the bosom of the Father ' ; 
though the Father himself does not appear as a personage any- 
where in the Prophetical Books. The passage in The Ghost of 
Abel is not, I think, to be set against this ; Blake is here dramatic- 
ally using Biblical imagery, not that of his own mythology. 

" The phrase is taken from the Anglican Burial Service. 



THE .ESTHETIC LIFE 99 

and the religious attitude commonly suggested by the 
expression * beUef in a personal God/ And here we 
are met by what looks at any rate Uke a marked difference 
of opinion between two of his best-known interpreters. 
On the one hand the late Mr. Swinburne in his celebrated 
Essay, which did so much to call general attention to 
the claims of Blake on the admiration of posterity, con- 
stantly speaks of him as a champion of pantheism against 
theism. On the other hand, Mr. Chesterton, in his inter- 
esting little book on the same subject, expresses himself 
strongly in the sense that, as he puts it, Blake " was 
on the side of historical Christianity on the fundamental 
question on which it confronts the East ; the idea that 
personality is the glory of the universe and not its shame ; 
that creation is higher than evolution because it is more 
personal; that pardon is higher than Nemesis because 
it is more personal." And, commenting on the lines of 
Blake which tell us that 

God appears and God is light 

To those poor souls that dwell in night. 

But does a human form display 

To those that dwell in realms of day, 

he expounds them thus : " God is merely light to the 
merely unenlightened. God is a man to the enlightened. 
We are permitted to remain for a time evolutionary or 
pantheistic until the time comes when we are worthy 
to be anthropomorphic." 12 

Now no doubt if by theism we mean what Blake calls 
deism, the belief in the remote Creator and stern Lawgiver 
of what was in his day described by the name, which 
he regarded as so monstrous, of ' Natural Rehgion,' then 

« Chesterton, William Blake, p. 148. 



100 DIVINE PERSONALITY 

Blake was, as Swinburne says, an enemy to theism. If 
by pantheism he meant the doctrine that human nature 
IS m the fullest sense the image of God and itself divine, 
then Blake was certainly a pantheist. But to much 
that is usually called pantheism he would have been 
uncompromisingly hostile. I do not recollect that he 
anywhere names Spinoza, and probably he had never 
read him. But, had he done so, I suspect that he would 
have placed him under the same ban as Locke, in whom 
he saw a type of the Reason which was the enemy and 
tyrannical oppressor of Imagination; a protagonist of 
the ' Natural Religion ' which he fiercely denounced as 
no religion at all. And Mr. Chesterton is no doubt right 
m holding that no way of thinking which finds God in 
what is not human and personal no less, if not more,than 
m what is such, would have won any sympathy from 
Blake. In what we call Nature as distinguished from 
man he could only discover divinity by discovering 
humanity also. It is only a " spectrous chaos" that 
speaks thus to Albion in the familiar vein of rationalistic 
philosophy, " I am your rational power, O Albion, and 
that Human Form You call Divine is but a Worm seventy 
mches long That creeps forth in a night and is dead in 
the morning sun. The fortuitous concourse of memorys 
accumulated and lost." '3 The precise opposite is in 
Blake's view the truth. For him even a real worm 
could not say with the Psalmist, " I am a worm and 
no man."M "Everything," he cries, "is Human."'5 
M. Maurice Maeterlinck in LOiseau Bleu feigns that in 
the dog and the cat, in bread and in sugar, in water and 

'3 Blake, Jerusalem, ii. 33, 5 ff. 

'4 Ps. xxii. 6. 

"5 Blake, Jerusalem, ii. 38. 48. 



THE ESTHETIC LIFE 101 

in light a human spirit Hes concealed which can assume 
on occasion a human form. So Blake, not in playful 
fancy but in bitter earnest, sees everywhere under the 
mask of bird and beast, even of river and mountain and 
city, not, as with M. Maeterlinck, a quasi-human nature 
which can take sides with or against our race as such, 
but a true humanity.i^ All reality is for him in its inner- 
most essence personal. Hence I do not question that 
Mr. Chesterton's interpretation of the verses I quoted 
above is essentially correct. True religion for Blake is 
personal intercourse with the Divine ; and * cosmic 
emotion ' but a makeshift for those who are still in dark- 
ness and the shadow of death. 

But it would be rash to assume that Blake, though 
certainly no ordinary pantheist, can be depended upon 
as a supporter of ordinary theism. *' The worship of 
God is : Honouring his gifts in other men, each according 
to his genius, and loving the greatest men best ; those 
who envy or calumniate great men hate God ; for there 
is no other God." So says the Devil in The Marriage of 
Heaven and Hell ; and those who know that strange 
and profound work of the singular genius whom we have 
been studying in this Lecture will remember it is the 
Devil's party (to which, we are incidentally told, Milton, 
being a true Poet, belonged without knowing it, and so 
in despite of himself made his Satan the hero of Paradise 
Lost) which is here represented as being on the right 
side. And indeed in his own person Blake had shortly 
before declared that " God only acts in existing beings 
or men." 

Such a declaration, reminding us as it does, almost 
to the very words, of some pronouncements by Signor 
i^ Jerusalem, ii. 38. 46 ff. 



102 DIVINE PERSONALITY 



1 



Croce which I quoted in my first course of Lectures, 
seem to place Blake, despite his high estimate of the f | 
dignity of human personality, definitely on the side of 
a theology which, like Signor Croce 's, will have nothing 
to do with a transcendent Deity, but only with Deus in 
nobis et nos, God in us and not other than we. It would 
take us too far from our main theme to pursue any further 
our investigations into Blake's religious teaching. It 
will be sufficient for the present to indicate the relation 
which, so far as the exploration we have already made 
has carried us, we find it to bear to that ' historical Christi- 
anity ' on the side of which Mr. Chesterton affirms him 
to stand in respect of the article of Divine Personality. 
For, as we saw in the earlier course, it is in historical 
Christianity that a stress has been laid on Personality 
in God which is absent from the other great religions of 
mankind. 

Now, on the one hand, there is much in the doctrine 
of this historical Christianity which is (as Blake was well 
aware) to a considerable degree in accord with this notion 
of his of God as only known in the persons of men. Ac- 
cording to that religion, although there is from eternity 
Personality in God, yet this has only been revealed in 
connexion with the appearance as very man among men 
of a Person in whose personal relation to his Father was 
manifested a permanent and inalienable feature of the 
Divine Life. God indeed, according to the dogma of 
Catholic Christianity, is, as we have often insisted, not 
a person at all. Nor does the correspondence of the 
Christian creed with such a view as Blake's or Croce's 
end here. It is Christ's own express teaching that a 
personal relation to himself is secured, and only secured, ; 
in personal service of his brethren : " Inasmuch as ye 



THE ESTHETIC LIFE 103 

did it unto one of the least of these, ye did it unto me/' ^7 
God in Jesus, Jesus in his brethren : this is a doctrine 
which Hes at the very heart of the Christian rehgion. 

While the main tradition of Christian theology is very 
far from endorsing views of the extreme kind held by some 
of the school of Albrecht Ritschl — and especially by 
Professor Wilhelm Herrmann of Marburg ^^ — who express 
themselves as if no knowledge of God which has come 
otherwise than through the historic Jesus can have real 
value for a Christian, yet to suppose that there is any 
source of such knowledge independent of the Person 
who was incarnate in him, that the Father can be ap- 
proached except through the Son, would be to violate 
the deepest instinct of Christian piety. And, if it cannot 
be denied that Christians have often indulged in a devo- 
tion to Jesus Christ of which the service of their Christian 
brethren might seem to form no essential part, it has 
been generally recognized that such a strain of sentiment 
has peculiar dangers. The soundest and most central 
type of practical Christianity has been at pains never 
to separate what Jesus himself so emphatically joined 
together. 

On the other hand there is a feature the absence of 
which from the religious temper of any one would, I think, 
at once stamp it as foreign to the Christian type, and 
which is missing in Blake, as also, unless I am mistaken, 
in Signer Croce — I mean the note of humility towards 
God. Blake constantly expresses his contempt for this 
in words which, although possibly susceptible of an 
interpretation which might bring them under the rubric 
of Christian orthodoxy, yet strike us at once as unquestion- 

17 Matt. XXV. 40. 

^8 Communion of the Christian with God (Eng. tr. 1906). 



104 DIVINE PERSONALITY 

ably discordant in tone not only with a merely conven- 
tional Christianity, but with the profoundest convictions 
of the Christian conscience. Such a saying as " Thou 
art a man, God is no more " ^9 will illustrate what I 
mean ; and it is noteworthy that when showing in some 
striking hues that the hero of the Gospels is no pattern 
of a righteousness of the sort ascribed there to the Scribes 
and Pharisees, a righteousness of strict conformity to 
Law and not of virtuous impulse, he notwithstanding 
seems to find in the humihty towards God which he 
cannot deny Jesus to have exhibited an exception to the 
triumphant splendour of his example : — 

And when he humbled himself to God, 
Then descended the cruel rod. 20 

A passage quoted in one of the lectures of my previous 
course from Signor Croce, according to which the '' man 
of reason's ** words, '' Courage and forward " are fully 
equivalent to the religious man's '* Let us leave it in 
God's hands," ^i show that the ItaHan philosopher would 
have been much of Blake's way of thinking in this regard. 
I venture to think that this consequence of a doctrine 
of pure immanence, even in a prophet of the dignity of 
Personality like Blake, reveals its inadequacy to give 
theoretical expression to the full demands of the religious 
consciousness. Signor Croce would probably not dispute 
this, holding as he does that the religious consciousness, 
just in this demand for the transcendence of its Object, 
is convicted of being no necessary or permanent form 

19 Blake, The Everlasting Gospel. 
2° Blake, The Everlasting Gospel. 

" Croce, Filos. delta Pratica, pt. i, s. 2, c. 5, pp. 178 f. ; cp. God 
and Personality, p. 198, 



THE AESTHETIC LIFE 105 

of spiritual experience, but a ' childish thing ' to be put 
away on the coming of a full spiritual manhood. I will 
only repeat for myself, with a full realization of the fact 
that the confession must write me down in Signor Croce's 
judgment as — I will not say an ass, but — a child in philo- 
sophy, that such an estimate of the rehgious conscious- 
ness seems to me wholly arbitrary and impossible to 
anyone who has a real and intimate religious experience 
of his own. 

There is, however, as one would expect, much to be 
learned from the sympathetic study of such a religious 
experience as Blake's — a deep and genuine religious 
experience in the soul of a great artist, of a type diverging 
as we have seen in some respects from the Christian, 
yet in some very close to it. There is a certain way of 
speaking about Divine Personality which may well find 
in it a valuable corrective. This is a way which is at 
once convicted of ineptitude by such a tale as the follow- 
ing. A certain schoolmaster, speaking of one who had 
presented a sum of money to his school, said : ** This 
generous benefactor desires to remain anonymous — and 
so his name will be known only to himself and to me and 
to God — and " (he added, recollecting that the secret had 
not been so closely kept as he had implied) — " and to one 
or two others.'* Everyone laughs at this story, perceiving 
at once the absurdity of reckoning God in as one of three 
or four possessors of a certain piece of information ; and, 
in so laughing, we instinctively acknowledge that God 
is not a person among others, the transcendence implied 
in the religious experience of worship requiring, if our 
theology is to be adequate to that experience, correction 
by the confession of his immanence in the worshipper, 
even in the very act of worship. 



106 DIVINE PERSONALITY 

A theology which neglects the immanence of God must 
not only fail, so long as there is genuine worship at all, 
to represent truly the facts of that religious experience 
which it claims to interpret, but may have an ill-effect on 
the piety which looks to it for intellectual guidance. 
It will tend to widen the breach between this piety and 
the mood natural to the artist, who thus comes into 
danger of deifying impersonal Nature and so falling 
back into a religion which misses the truth that was 
never out of Blake's sight, the truth which he expresses 
by his discovery in everything not only of Deity but of 
Humanity and therefore of Personality. Nevertheless it 
is not to be overlooked that the attitude towards Nature 
even of the artist who finds satisfaction in the thought 
that Nature is not human does in fact imply a personifi- 
cation of Nature ; and that, on the other hand, the most 
devout worshipper under the forms of traditional religion 
is often found dwelling in like manner on the contrast 
between God and man, saying, it may be, with David 
in the Bible story : " Let us fall into the hand of the 
Lord, for very great are his mercies, but let me not fall 
into the hand of man." 23 

I do not intend to enter at this point into a discussion 
of the religious value of a worship which finds God in 
Nature apart from man rather than in the activities of 
the human spirit, as compared with one for which it is 
precisely in these latter that the Divinity hidden in Nature 
is properly speaking revealed. 

The facts are by no means to be ignored which led 

Coleridge to say that the world (by which in this context 

he means the same as is meant by Nature, in the sense 

in which we are here using the expression) " so far from 

22 2 Sam. xxiv. 14. 



THE J5STHETIC LIFE 107 

being a goddess in petticoats is rather the Devil in a 
straight waistcoat " ; 23 or Mrs. Browning to affirm in 
more poetical language that we " may discern the heart 
of a lost angel in the earth." 24 

These facts at the very least militate strongly against 
an identification of Nature with God and may well suggest 
that there exist in the universe wills other than human, 
which, like many human wills, are evil or at any rate 
not wholly good, and that to such imperfect wills are to 
be ascribed what in nature we must reckon evil and yet 
cannot ascribe to human sin.^s Into these questions I 
do not propose now to enter, and I mention them only 
to show that I am not unaware of their urgency and that 
I perceive them to have a bearing on the problem whether 
a purely natural religion is possible. For our present 
purpose it is quite sufficient to remark that, as has been 
already observed, the worshipper of Nature personifies 
the object of his worship, and thus may be called as a 
witness to the need for Religion of acknowledging Person- 
ality in God ; while the artist's discontent, like that of 
the man of science, with a certain way of representing 
Divine Personality serves rather to purify and enrich than 
to render untenable the Theism which it tends to reject. 

This work of purification and enrichment may be said, 
where we are concerned with the artist, to take two 
forms. In the first place we have the correction, after 
a fashion which in a Lecture of my former course 26 
I suggested was desirable, of an inadequate mode of 
envisaging Divine Personality, by the recognition that in 

23 Coleridge, Table Talk, Apr. 30, 1830. 
34 A Drama of Exile. 

*S Cp. my Problems in the Relations between God and Man, 
p. 270 ; Studies in t?3 History of Natural Theology, p. 100. 
*6 God and PersomJity, p. 268. 



108 DIVINE PERSONALITY 

the artist no less than in the geometer or in the moralist 
may the ' image of God ' be traced. In the second place, 
the artist's or poet's impatience of the seemingly in- 
comprehensible restrictions imposed upon the free exercise 
of imagination by creeds or dogmas may call attention 
to the element of artistic creation which is involved in 
all our representations of God, even in those which assume 
dogmatic form. The recognition of such an element is 
m no wise incompatible with regarding Religion as 
genuine experience, the apprehension of an independent 
or objective Reahty. It has been lately pointed out by 
Signor Croce that in all perception there is an element 
of self-expression which is fundamentally of the same 
nature as that which appears with greater intensity in 
the creative activity of the artist. For we may gratefully 
accept the light here thrown by this acute thinker upon 
our present problem, without committing ourselves to 
the systematic mapping out of the forms of our spiritual 
life with which it is connected. 

We may say that the higher the object which we 
apprehend, the larger is the measure in which this element 
of self-expression is present. Thus for intimate acquaint- 
ance with another person we need imagination in a greater 
degree than for the study of impersonal beings. No one 
would deny that without imagination the sympathetic 
understanding of a friend's character (or even for that 
matter the intelligent comprehension of an enemy's) 
would be impossible ; yet few would doubt that what 
is thus understood is independently real. Just so in 
Religion, which is communion with the Divine, we may 
recognize the exercise of imagination, and that in an 
eminent degree, to be indispensable, without on that 
account disputing the genuine reality of its Object. 



THE iESTHETIC LIFE 109 

An eminent German writer of our own day has ob- 
served that " creative geniuses in every field, even where 
they come into sharp conflict with the traditional religion, 
have felt as though they were led and guarded by an 
unseen Power." 27 ♦* This consciousness," he continues, 
" takes a different form in each of life's different depart- 
ments. The great artist feels it differently from the 
great thinker. He will be more directly conscious of 
his creative power as being a gift and something that 
lifts him above himself." I think that on the whole 
these remarks are justified ; and that in the temper 
characteristic of those who represent the aesthetic activity 
at its best the sense of a creative energy within themselves, 
which disdains to be controlled by the ' dead hand ' of 
institutions or creeds, is balanced by a consciousness of 
being, in the very exercise of that creative energy, the 
instruments and vehicles of a transcendent Power, even 
though envisaged in a form no less vague than that of 
the Principle of Beauty towards whichl (along with the 
Eternal Being and the Memory of great men) Keats in 
the Preface to Endymion expresses a " feel of humility." 
Even Blake, from whom such a * feel of humility ' seems, 
as we have seen, to be markedly absent, regarded his 
' prophetical books ' as written at the dictation of his 
' friends in Eternity.' ^8 

This being so, there is nothing, one would say, alien 
to such a temperament in the recognition of Personality 
in God. For the humility which is naturally engendered 
by the consciousness in religious worship of a personal 
relation to the Highest, has nothing in it inconsistent 

27 Eucken, Can we still he Christians? (Eng. tr.), pp. 104-5. 

28 See his letters of Apr. 25 and July 6, 1803 ,to Butts, in Gilchrist's 
Life, i. pp. 185, 187. Cp. the address ' to the Public ' prefixed to 
Jerusalem. 



110 DIVINE PERSONALITY 

with the profoundest sense on the artist's part of a 
creative energy expressing itself in his special activity ; 
on the contrary it agrees very well with the deep-seated 
consciousness that this very energy is itself a gift ; and 
may naturally be felt even to involve a sense of the high 
dignity of his own vocation. But he will rightly refuse 
to think of God after a fashion which would make him 
not the inspirer of the artist's imagination, but merely 
the beneficiary of his achievements ; so that his offering 
of his own peculiar endowments in God's service should 
appear a treatment of them as mere means to an end in 
no wise aesthetic. A God who should thus accept the 
works of a poet or artist in the spirit of a preacher or 
missioner who wants a revival hymn set to a taking 
tune, or of a clergyman who desires to attract a congre- 
gation to his church by an ornate ritual — such a God 
can assuredly be no God for the artist. But to conceive 
God in this manner is for everyone who, like the artist, 
is capable of a genuine appreciation of beauty to mis- 
conceive him and to set up a false God in the place of 
the true ; since it is to conceive him as less than the 
highest that we can conceive. 

The quarrel of the artist with Theism is often the 
expression of his dissatisfaction with a morality which 
seems to disapprove and condemn what he is sure is 
good ; and he thinks of the God of whom he hears from 
the pulpit as just this censorious morality imagined as 
seated upon the throne of the universe. It is remarkable 
that Blake, whom we took in an earlier part of this 
Lecture as a type of the artist, has sometimes flung 
himself into outbursts in which he flouts and outrages 
the most sacred canons of the accepted moral code. 
Such passages seem strangely at variance with their 



THE ESTHETIC LIFE 111 

author's simple and blameless life, and yet they were 
most certainly seriously intended ; one cannot conceive 
him as excusing himself, like Martial, on the ground 
that "his page was wanton but his life was clean." 29 
What inspires even the most extravagant of them is the 
artist's passionate refusal to deny, in obedience to a law 
which has no care for beauty, the goodness of anything 
that is beautiful. If we identify ReHgion with Morality, 
or (which is the same thing) affirm that God is such 
an one as the Urizen of Blake's mythology, we shall 
never be able to overcome the artist's alienation from 
Religion. But Religion is not merely another name for 
Morahty. I would end this Lecture, if I may, by repeat- 
ing words which I have used elsewhere and in which 
I have tried to express what I believe to be the true 
relation which it bears to two great forms of spiritual 
activity which often seem to clash— the aesthetic, with 
which we have been deaUng to-day, and the ethical, to 
which my next Lecture will be devoted. 

'' It is Religion— that is, the experience in which the 
soul is aware of itself as one or as capable of being one 
with the heart of ReaUty— which guarantees what we 
perceive of Beauty and of Goodness alike as no merely 
subjective or superficial appearances, but as intimations 
of the ultimate nature of that Reality whose essential 
attributes are manifested therein. Not only does Religion 
in this way guarantee Art and Morahty as laying hold 
of Reality, but also, by its interpretation of. both as wit- 
nesses to different attributes of one Reality, it secures 
each against the dangers which threaten it from its 
complete separation from the other. The selfishness and 
cruelty which sometimes attend upon one-sided sesthetic- 
39 i. 4, 5. Lasciua est nobis pagina, uita proba. 



112 DIVINE PERSONALITY 

ism lose their inspiration when those elements of value 
in the world to which the sense of Beauty testifies are 
held to be secure in God, although certain modes of 
their expression are found to be incompatible with Duty. 
And that censoriousness of a one-sided morahsm, which 
is constantly imposing Hmits upon artistic expression, 
limits which seem to the artist, with his passionate sense 
of Beauty, the fetters of an intolerable slavery, is cor- 
rected by the faith which, even in denying the legitimacy 
of certain modes of artistic expression, affirms that that 
which they would fain express is, so far as it is beautiful, 
also divine, and, even although it remain here and thus 
unexpressed, eternally secure in God." 30 ^'''*- 

30 Group Theories of Religion, pp. 187, 188. 



LECTURE V 

DIVINE PERSONALITY AND THE MORAL 

LIFE 

At the end of the preceding Lecture I reminded you of 
a conflict which is apt to break out between the attitudes 
toward hf e associated with the aesthetic and moral activities 
of the human spirit respectively, and suggested that in 
Religion it is possible to reach a point of view from which 
justice can be done to both parties in this controversy. 
This possibility depended upon the recognition of a dis- 
tinction between Rehgion and Morality, a distinction 
which had already been considered in the fifth Lecture 
of my earlier course. But the very need to call attention 
to this distinction implies that there is a temptation to 
identify them. And, if proof were needed that this 
temptation exists, it would be sufficient to mention the 
name of Kant. It must, however, be observed as a fact 
of some importance to our present inquiry that it is much 
greater where the Rehgion in vogue is of the type usually 
designated as ' theism ' and associated at the present 
day with the expression ' sl personal God ' than where 
the prevalent form of faith would be described in a popular 
classification as polytheistic or pantheistic. Where men 
worship one God it seems natural to regard him as the 
moral legislator and judge of the universe and moral 

laws as his commands. Such a representation, as we 

8 1^3 



114 DIVINE PERSONALITY 

saw, is apt to jar upon the artist, and is introduced by 
Blake into his mythology under the name of Urizen, as 
the picture not of the good or the highest God, but rather 
of a Demiurge such as he to whom some of the heretical 
Gnostics in the primitive age of the Christian Church 
had, much in the spirit of Blake, attributed the origin 
both of the material world and of the Old Testament with 
its law of commandments contained in ordinances.^ 

But with this very same representation Morality has 
often found itself quite at home. This association of 
Theism with Morality has its reverse in the notion which 
has so often been common that Atheism is inconsistent 
with moral rectitude, and the suspicion that the free think- 
ing which leads to Atheism is a '' cloke of maliciousness." ^ 
In a very large number of instances such a suspicion has 
been grossly unjust, and nowadays the reaction from the 
whole attitude which engendered it is so strong in us that 
we are perhaps more ready to expect in an Atheist an 
austere dignity of conduct than a reckless abandonment 
to sensual self-indulgence. 

Perhaps even this expectation is rather of yesterday 
than of to-day. It belonged to a generation bred in an 
atmosphere wherein to deny that there is any God above 
from whom to expect " the due reward of our deeds " 
needed not only the courage to defy public opinion and 
face public obloquy but also the strength to maintain a 
high standard of duty for oneself without the support 
of faith in supernatural approval and assistance. But 
the prevalent — or at least a very common — temper of 
thoughtful men at the present moment is probably that 
which finds utterance in the declaration of an able American 

I Eph. ii. 15. 
s 1 Pet. ii. 16. 



THE MORAL LIFE 115 

thinker now living, Professor Parker of Michigan, that 
for him who has renounced a behef in God " a new world 
dawns." For'' we cannot look upon the cosmos as cruel 
for not realizing our wishes." The same writer adds : 
" After having lived some time away from the theistic 
position, one does not look back with regret upon it." 
" The conception of man as the world's darling, cared for 
by a benignant heavenly father, while appealing to old 
memories in moments of weakness, is too unreal and too 
httle challenging to courage and adventure, to keep hold 
of the twentieth century man. One finally ceases to 
wish to live in that protected world. "3 Here Atheism 
is regarded not merely as requiring some remarkable 
qualities in its adherents by reason of its lack of inspira- 
tion or of social encouragement, but as at once presenting 
a view of the universe ethically more satisfactory and pro- 
moting a finer type of character than those which were 
or could reasonably be associated with the faith which 
it abandons. 

With respect to the second reason assigned by Professor 
Parker for his satisfaction in exchanging Theism for its 
opposite, it is sufficient to say that the description which 
he gives of the faith upon which he now looks back without 
regret is in no respect true of historical Christianity. 
It may apply fairly well to some moods of sentimental 
piety which have frequently flourished under the shadow 
of Christianity, perhaps even to certain theologies of 
comparatively recent origin which have sprung up 
about it and drawn sustenance from its roots, but from 
which a somewhat unheroic optimism and universalism 
have driven out the sterner elements of its creed. But 
who could recognize in this picture of a sheltered, timid, 
3 Parker, The Self and Nature, pp. 313, 315. 



116 DIVINE PERSONALITY 

unadventurous faith, unbraced by the discipline of real 
life, the religion of Paul or Augustine or Dante or Luther 
or John of the Cross or Bunyan or Pascal or Wesley ? 
We cannot help feeling here that Professor Parker is 
speaking of something whereof he knows but little. 

From his other ground of satisfaction in parting from 
a belief in God, the heights and depths of which he so 
little comprehends, we may however learn something more 
to our purpose. We may learn that Theism dies hard 
even in those who least desire to keep it alive. For in 
fact the sense of relief that the world is better than we 
thought, because it did not intend the evil, the disap- 
pointment of our wishes, which it has produced, is expressed 
in terms redolent of that very personification of the Supreme 
Reality which Professor Parker would fain avoid. We 
had, it is suggested, previously suffered under the night- 
mare-like thought that it was deliberately bent on frustrat- 
ing our desires, or at the least was most callously in- 
different to the fulfilment of them. But now we have 
learned that it knew and cared nothing about them, 
our resentment is appeased. We cannot indeed worship 
it as God or trust it as a Father, but we have a better 
opinion of its character than when we believed it to claim 
from us such veneration and confidence. Through the 
whole argument we are sensible of the secret influence 
upon the writer's attitude of that irresistible tendency 
to apply ethical predicates to the Supreme Reality, which 
is in truth one of the strongest supports of Theism, and 
(I should not fear to add) one of the strongest arguments 
in its favour. When I was dealing in my former course 
of Lectures with the problem of Evil, I attempted to show 
that to hope by denying Personality to God really to 
abolish that problem, was to fall into the fallacy of assum- 



THE MORAL LIFE 117 

ing that an argument valid within a restricted field of 
experience must necessarily be valid when extended to 
the whole universe of reality. I conceive that Professor 
Parker is in fact urging precisely the argument against 
which that criticism was brought, and that I have not 
therefore anything new to say about it which I have 
not already said there. 4 

Not only do I think that the attempt must fail to 
claim for Atheism (apart from the individual circumstances 
of particular cases) any moral superiority to Theism, 
but I doubt whether the old prejudice on moral grounds 
against Atheism did not contain a kernel of truth. 

To prejudice the moral reputation of one to whose 
speculative convictions we are opposed on grounds of 
reason is so odious an action that we are inevitably shy 
of even appearing to perform it. Nevertheless is it not 
part of the relief which some minds feel in parting 
from a belief in God that, however little they may 
desire to plunge into courses which would be reprobated 

4 It should here be observed that Professor Parker does not, 
in rejecting Theism, " regard man as the sport of bhnd and inferior 
forces, or suppose there is no reason for our failure and death." 
He indulges in the speculation that these subserve the development 
of beings " doubtless far higher than we," as those of the lower 
creation minister in their turn to ours. " Nature," he says, " has 
co-operated with us in our endeavours, adjusting its will to ours, 
so far as it could." 

While it is impossible to study without profit so vigorous, sincere, 
and independent a treatment of these great problems as Professor 
Parker's, I must confess that I do not share his complacency in 
the Weltanschauung which he recommends, or feel that for my 
part I should obtain any relief from the pressure of the ' riddle 
of the painful earth ' by adopting it in exchange for a belief in 
God. And I am not even sure that it is not after all a theistic 
Weltanschauung, at any rate in the sense in which doctrines of 
a ' finite God ' may be so called. That the word ' Nature ' is 
substituted for the word ' God ' does not seem to me greatly to 
matter. 



118 DIVINE PERSONALITY 

by society or by their own conscience, or even to do any- 
thing which behevers in God would consider to be displeas- 
ing in his sight, they nevertheless welcome the sense of 
no longer having to live " as ever in my great Taskmaster's 
eye " ? 5 I know that I have myself often experienced 
the attraction of such a prospect. It seems in some 
moods that, by abandoning belief in God, one might 
escape from a strain to which human nature is unequal 
into an easier life, wherein, without laying aside the 
decencies and self-restraints of civilization, or ceasing to 
delight in noble thoughts and deeds, or forfeiting the 
comfort which comes from self-respect, we might more 
easily forget our own sins and tolerate our own faults of 
character, might feel less bound to anxious self-scrutiny 
and to a penitence inconsistent with the equable cheerful- 
ness which makes life's wheels run smoothly. I do not 
think I am uncharitable in conjecturing that many others 
beside myself may at times have shared such sentiments 
as these, and that some of that number, if they have on 
grounds of reason found themselves unable to retain faith 
in God, have experienced in some measure a consolation 
for what they have lost in the relief of feeling that they 
had not any more to do with one to whose eyes all is naked 
and opened and who reads the most secret thoughts and 
intents of the heart. ^ Yet I do not think that we can 
without much loss welcome in this way the disappearance 
from within us of that consciousness which the youthful 
Milton described in the famous line quoted above ; except 
indeed where it is not the surrender of our belief in God 
but the perfecting of our love for him which has cast out 
from our souls the fear of his severe inquisition. 7 

5 Milton, Sonnet on his being arrived at the Age of Twenty-three, 

6 Heb. iv. 12, 13. 7 See i John iv. 18. 



THE MORAL LIFE 119 

We need not then be deterred by the fact that some have 
made an improper and unjustified use, as a stick with 
which to beat their speculative or pohtical opponents, 
of the congruity of a beHef in God with our moral experience 
from frankly acknowledging that this congruity exists. 
It is a remarkable testimony to its existence that Kant, 
for all his anxiety to dissociate the obligation of Morality 
from any sanction external to the reason and conscience 
of the persons obliged, should feel himself constrained to 
admit the legitimacy of the famihar language which 
represents the Moral Law as divinely commanded, al- 
though he is careful to remind us that we must not look 
upon actions as obligatory because they are the commands 
of God, but should regard them as his commands only 
because we have an inward obligation to perform them.^ 

I venture to think, however, that his choice of the word 
' autonomy ' to express what Butler 9 had called the 
*' manifest authority " of conscience was not in all respects 
a fortunate one. I will begin my criticism of this expression 
by stating in somewhat different terms from his the truth 
about Morality upon which I take Kant to be chiefly 
insisting in his doctrine of the Autonomy of the Practical 
Reason. I will then attempt shortly to describe the 
motives which led him to select the word ' autonomy ' 
for use in this connexion, and finally I will point out in 
what respect it seems to me apt to lead our reflections 
on the subject into a wrong track, and suggest that it 
must actually bear some part of the responsibility for 

s See Kv. der v. V. Methodenlehre, 2 H. 3 Abschn. (Hart. iii. 
p. 546). Cp. Grundlegung zuv Metaphys. der Sitten III (H. iv. 
p. 291) ; Kv. der prakt. V. i Th. 2 B. 2 H., sec. V. (H. v. p. 131) ; 
Religion innerhalb der Gr. der hi. V., iii. i, § 3 (H. vi. p. 196). 
Tugendlehre, Beschluss (H. vii. p. 299). 

9 Butler, Second Sermon on Human Nature. 



1^ DIVINE PERSONALITY 

what I shall maintain to be a mistaken theory both of 
moral and of political obligation. 

When I only will some course of action because some one 
tells me it is right or because I see it conduces to something 
else which I desire, I do not in the strictest sense will 
that course of action as the one thing to be wiUed, 
as the unconditionally right and good thing. Just in 
the same way, when I make a mathematical statement 
on the authority of a text-book or of a professor of the 
science, or because I see that it will bring out the result 
hoped for, this is not really the same thing with seeing the 
necessity of the statement which I make. That I must see 
for myself immediately if I am to see it at all ; I must see 
that this is the only thing that could be said in the case. 
Now I may quite intelligibly say that I only will for myself 
in the fullest sense what I will as the sole thing to be wiUed, 
the one right thing, just as I may intelligibly say that I 
only think in the fullest sense what I see to be the one thing 
thinkable. 

We may, if we choose, speak in this sense of the Good 
Will, as autonomous, in contrast with a Will which chooses 
on grounds other than its own perception of the goodness 
of what is chosen and which may thus be called heteronom- 
ous. Yet such language must not be allowed to suggest 
that it is from my willing what is right that the obligation 
to do right comes. I cannot really think that my wilHng 
what is right is the source of my obligation to do it, 
although except by willing it I cannot reahze the obliga- 
tion, and in reaHzing the obligation I must so far in a 
sense will it, even if I do not actually will to do it, but take 
another and therefore wrong course. Just so I can only 
really think mathematically or logically so far as I see 
for myself the mathematical or logical necessity of what 



THE MORAL LIFE 121 

I think, and in so seeing the necessity of something I 
must certainly think it so to be ; but although I may break 
off thinking of it at all rather than pursue the subject 
further, yet I do not and cannot regard the necessity of 
what I thus think as due to my thinking it. ^o 

This truth, as it seems to me, Kant does not make 
so clear as might have been wished, in view of the fact 
that the word autonomy is one which lends itself so easily 
to an interpretation inconsistent with the independence 
of the obligation upon my willing to perform the obligatory 
act. The choice of the expression itself is to be explained 
by the marked tendency of the ethical doctrines which 
were prevalent in his day to seek the ground of moral 
obligation in something which might have been other than 
it is, we remaining the same, so that we might say — * I 
will to do this, because I wish to be happy, and I find 
that this will tend to make me so,' or ' I will do this, be- 
cause it is written in a credible record of teaching, attested 
by accompanying miracles to be of supernatural origin, 
that thus and not otherwise am I commanded to do by 
a God who rewards obedience to his laws with eternal 
bliss and punishes disobedience to them with eternal 
misery.' 

In opposition to any such teaching Kant desired to 
emphasize the intrinsic obhgatoriness of that which 
the Moral Law enjoins ; and the form in which he did this 
was that of asserting that no extrinsic consideration could 
be the ground of the will to do right, which must thus 
be recognized as itself somehow the source of the very 

10 This paragraph is repeated, with sHght alterations, from an 
article of mine on The Permanent Meaning of Propitiation, which 
appeared in The Constructive Quarterly for March 19 17, and was 
reprinted in a collection of addresses published by Mr. Blackwell 
under the title, In Time of War. 



122 DIVINE PERSONALITY 

law which from another point of view it obeys. He is 
indeed far from being unaware of the paradoxical appear- 
ance of his doctrine which in the case of a man accused 
by his conscience of disobeying the moral law would make 
the judge on the bench identical with the prisoner at the 
bar." But he fell back for a solution of the paradox 
on the distinction, which plays so large a part in his philo- 
sophy, of the homo noumenon from the homo phcenomcnon : 
of the higher self which, itself pure reason, reveals itself 
in that consciousness of an absolute and unconditional 
authority to which we give the name of moral consciousness, 
from the lower self, which is all that presents itself to 
observation and reflexion and which, though ' rational ' 
in its susceptibiHty to the imperative of MoraHty, yet 
experiences also the soHcitations of sense, and appears as 
a particular object among others, subject to the conditions 
which the structure of the objective world imposes upon 
every part of itself. 

This is not the place to enter upon a full discussion of 
this Kantian contrast, which may give occasion, as is 
obvious, to not a few very hard questions. But it is note- 
worthy that Kant in several passages is driven to a virtual 
admission that it is in practice impossible to avoid re- 
presenting to ourselves the judge at whose tribunal our 
conscience accuses us when we do wrong, as a holy God, 
looking upon the injunctions of the moral law as his com- 
mands, and attributing to him the power (which w& 
certainly do not possess, at least to any considerable 
degree), not only to will the contents of that law but 
to give them effect in the real world.^^ Nor, although 

" Tugendlehre, Eth. Eiem. i B. i Abth. iii. H. (H. \ii. pp. 
245-6). 

" See Kr. dev pr. V. loc. supra cit. ; cp. Kr. dew. V., Methoden- 
lehre, 2 Hpt&t. 3 Abschn. (H. iii. 546). 



THE MORAL LIFE 123 

Kant is very careful to insist that such a God must 
be regarded as an ideal Being, in the sense that he 
cannot be an object of sensible experience (and for 
Kant this would carry with it the consequence that he 
cannot be the object of such personal intercourse as I 
have contended that God does in Religion become), is 
there any need to doubt that Kant himself did believe 
in the real existence of such a Supreme Moral Governor. 
But in his anxiety to disclaim any knowledge, properly 
so called, of a Being who transcended what he took to 
be the conditions of any knowledge open to our intelli- 
gence, he missed, as it seems to me, the true conclusion 
to be drawn from that consciousness of moral obligation 
which few have felt more profoundly and no one perhaps 
described more accurately than he. That conclusion I 
take to be the one stated explicitly and impressively by 
James Martineau, of whose view I may take as a sum- 
mary the following quotation, in which he brings together 
the epistemological and the ethical realism which alike 
sundered him from Kant, to whose teaching he notwith- 
standing owed so much and with whose grave passion 
for the " stern lawgiver " Duty his own temper was so 
sympathetic. " In the act of Perception," he says, 
" we are immediately introduced to an other than ourselves 
that gives us what we feel ; in the act of Conscience we are 
immediately introduced to a Higher than ourselves that 
gives us what we feel." ^3 

It will be, however, worth our while to notice how very 
near to the position of Martineau Kant himself came, 
and at the same time to note that it was not only the 
refusal characteristic of the Critical Philosophy to claim 
knowledge outside of the sphere wherein the senses can 
=^3 Study of Religion, ii. 27. 



124 DIVINE PERSONALITY 

verify the inferences of the understanding — though this 
refusal was no doubt of prime importance in the matter 
— which held him back from a Hke confession of a direct 
revelation in Conscience of a Personal God. 

" It takes two/' says Martineau in one place, " to 
establish an obhgation. . . . The person that hears the 
obligation cannot also be the person whose presence 
imposes it ; it is impossible to be at once the upper and 
the nether millstone. Personahty is unitary and in 
occupying one side of a given relation is unable to be also 
on the other.'' Hence, he goes on, the sense of authority 
in the moral law implies " the recognition of another than 
I . . . another greater and higher and of deeper insight." ^ 
We have already noted that the difficulty here pointed 
out of identifying the subject and the imponent of the 
Moral Law had not escaped Kant ; but that he would 
solve it by his distinction of the noumenal and the em- 
pirical self in man, although admitting at the same time 
the convenience (to say the least) of envisaging the impo- 
nent as an ideal Being in whom our own rational will, 

14 Types of Ethical Theory, ii. pp. 107 £f. The value of this passage 
is, I venture to think, considerably underrated by Professor Pringle 
Pattison {Idea of God, p. 36). The appearance of Martineau's 
two great works on Ethics and the Philosophy of Religion, Types 
of Ethical Theory and A Study of Religion, at a time when (especi- 
ally at Oxford) the influence of Green was at its height made them, 
largely no doubt on account of their style which was that of their 
author's generation (he was in his eightieth year when the earlier 
of the two appeared), seem to some who, like myself, were then 
young students of philosophy, old-fashioned and lacking in pro- 
fundity. In later years I have re-read them with greatly increased 
admiration, and have seen how well this writer deserved the com- 
mendation which I recollect my lamented teacher, Professor Cook 
Wilson, long ago bestowing on him for his bold faithfulness to the 
facts of our common moral experience. Cp. C6sar Malan fils on 
the consciousness of obligation as une experience imposde (G. Frommel, 
Cdsar Malan fils, in Semaine religieuse de Geneve, Jan. 13, 1900). 



THE MORAL LIFE 125 

which utters itself in the Moral Law, is personified and so 
distinguished from my personahty who am called upon 
to obey that same Moral Law. 

That he should acquiesce in a position of this kind is 
of course, as students of his philosophy will at once per- 
ceive, of a piece with that feature of his system which has 
been described as the doctrine of the als oh, ' as though 
it were.' We must, for example, study organic nature 
as though it were the work of design, act and Hve as though 
we were free, immortal, and under moral government, 
but we must not assert as matter of knowledge that 
which we thus may, or even must, postulate as guiding 
or regulative principles of thought or conduct. But, 
not to digress into a general discussion of the attitude 
which is expressed in such a doctrine, and confining 
ourselves to the instance with which we are here im- 
mediately concerned, it is singularly difficult to maintain 
it in the case of reverence for the imponent of the Moral 
Law. " Reverence," says Kant,i5 " refers always to per- 
sons only ' as its object,' never to things. Things can 
arouse in us inclination, and if things are animals (e.g. 
horses, dogs, etc.) also love, or again fear, as with the 
sea, a volcano, a beast of prey— but never reverence." 
He goes on '^ to observe that we try to rid ourselves of 
the burden of reverence for other men by attempting to 
find flaws in them. " Even the Moral Law itself in its 
solemn majesty " ^7 is exposed to these attempts ; that is 
why people try to identify it with mere sentiment and 
so forth. But is the Moral Law a Person ? or is it personal 
only in us ? We have to distinguish it from ourselves, 

15 Kritik der praktischer Vernunff, i Th. i B, iii. Hptst. (H. 
V. p. 8i). 

i6 Ibid. (H. V. p. 82). 

17 In seiner feierlichen MajestdL 



i 



126 DIVINE PERSONALITY 

as we have seen, and even Kant, though sometimes 
identifying our personaUty with that common Reason 
which utters itself in every man's conscience, on occasion 
falls into that other way of speaking which applies the 
epithet ' personal ' to what distinguishes one man from 
another and modifies, if it does not counteract, in each 
of us the action of the reason common to all. Is not 
our only way of escape from the embarrassment created 
by the presence in us of this implanted sentiment of 
reverence for what, though bound up with our personality, 
is yet, as the object of our reverence, distinguished from 
it, the frank recognition of a Personal God, in the 
sense in which I have been contending for it in these 
lectures : of a God who is not only immanent but 
transcendent, with whom a relation only to be described 
as personal intercourse is possible, and is, in the experience 
of Religion, actually enjoyed ? 

I referred above to a consideration which seems to have 
reinforced in the mind of Kant his general tendency 
to limit knowledge and experience to the sphere whereii^ 
sensible verification is possible as a motive for not accept- 
ing this obvious and familiar solution of the problem 
prescribed to the intellect by the fact of moral obligation. 
I had in mind the peculiar theory of Moral Sovereignty 
with which we meet in his ethical writings. 

It is well known that Kant describes the world as contem- 
plated from the ethical point of view as a ' Kingdom of 
Ends,' that is, as an ordered community of beings every 
one of which is an ' end in himself,' and bound to recognize 
in his treatment ahke of himself and of all his fellow 
members in that Kingdom that each and all possess this 
character. In this Kingdom we may ascribe Sovereignty 
in a special sense to God, because in him there is, as 



THE MORAL LIFE 127 

we suppose, no recalcitrant lower nature by the side of 
a higher, upon which the action which is in accordance 
with the higher imposes itself as a duty to be performed, 
against the grain, as it were. He is sovereign, not because 
the laws of the Kingdom derive their obligation from 
ihis authority, but because he is not, like all the other 
I members of it, conscious of subjection as well as of au- 
tonomy, and because, for this reason, the others can look 
to him as the representative of what is the true will 
of all, but which, although it is really our own true 
will, and although on reflection we must acknowledge 
; it so to be, it seems nevertheless to the rest of us, 
j owing to the recalcitrant element in our nature, to be 
\ not what we would do but what we must ; a constraint 
, being laid upon us, though a constraint against which 
j we know that we ought not to rebel. ^^ 

I think it will be instructive to seek for more light upon 
I this peculiar conception of the place of God in the ' King- 
dom of Ends ' in Kant's choice of the word Reich, which 
is in this connection translated ' Kingdom.' ^9 To Kant 
this word would not have suggested the Prussian State, 
of which he himself was a subject, with its efficient and 
centralized military autocracy, then not a century old, 
whose later history of vaulting ambition and sudden 
downfall is in the memory of us all to-day. That was a 
Konigreich ; but Kant does not employ this word for the 
spiritual commonwealth of which he speaks. He calls 
it a Reich ; and Reich had to the German of his time a 
quite specific meaning. It meant the Empire, Roman in 



18 See Kant's Grundlegung zur Metaphysik der Sitten, 2 Abschn. 
(H. iv. pp. 280 ff.). 

19 The immediate suggestion of the phrase probably came from 
Leibnitz. See Monadologie, §§ 85 ff. 



128 DIVINE PERSONALITY 

name and German in fact, of which the Prussian sovereign 
was but a subordinate member. The head of this State 
enjoyed in those countries of which he was only Emperor, 
and not also the ruler by some other title, a position at 
once far more venerable and dignified and far less powerful 
and independent than that which Frederick the Great and 
his successor exercised within the dominions which ac- 
knowledged their sway. 

Das Hebe heil'ge rom'sche Reich 
Wie halts nur noch zusammen ? 

' Good old holy Roman Empire I How does it still 
hang together ! ' — so sings one of the jolly companions 
whom Faust and Mephistopheles join in Auerbach's 
wine-shop at Leipzig. ^o The disrespectful allusion dates 
from a time not long after that at which Kant had borrowed 
the title of this same illustrious institution to describe 
the community whose bond is the eternal Moral Law, 
and of which God is the centre. Is it altogether fanciful 
to see in the position of God in that community an anti- 
type of the Emperor's in the Reich of Kant's and Goethe's 
day, the position of one who differs from other Princes 
of the Empire in that, unlike them, he has himself no 
superior ; whose supremacy is the expression of the 
common law which, among all the diversities of territorial 
enactments, runs throughout the Empire, yet towards 
whom the other Princes certainly do not stand in the posi- 
tion of subjects rendering him a ' habitual obedience,' 
in the sense of the Austinian definition of Sovereignty ? 

But it is precisely because Kant, as we have often had 
occasion to point out, combined with a profound insight 
into the nature of morality and a keen sensitiveness to 
*o Goethe, Faust, I. 2090. 



THE MORAL LIFE 129 

anything which might prove derogatory to the dignity 
of that human nature which is capable of MoraHty, a 
defective sense for the specifically religious factor in human 
life and a haunting dread of the fanaticism which might 
be fostered by belief in a personal intercourse with the 
Supreme, that he was content to describe the relation 
of our spirits to God under a figure thus suggestive of 
something very different to that consciousness of depen- 
dence upon him, in which Schleiermacher found the 
essence of Religion, and which is at least a characteristic 
property that it cannot, while it remains Religion, cease 
to exhibit. 

The frank recognition, which we find in Martineau, 
of the theistic implications of the consciousness of obliga- 
tion is a step forward which we shall do well to make; 
although in making it we shall be wise to bear in mind, 
as useful warnings to ourselves, the considerations which 
withheld Kant from advancing in this direction. We shall 
take care lest, in recognizing that the consciousness of 
the Moral Law introduces us, as Martineau puts it, into 
the presence of a Divine Lawgiver, we deny to that law 
an intrinsic authority, needing not to be guaranteed by 
any other revelation from God than that which itself is. 
We shall also be on our guard lest, in refusing to forbid 
the devout soul the enjoyment of intimate communion 
with her Beloved, we forget that the critical under- 
standing has a part to play in the service of God and aban- 
don ourselves without reserve to the suggestions of a 
pious fancy, until we become victims of illusions such as 
those which Kant was so keenly desirous to discourage 
that he was suspicious of all use of words or gestures 
in private prayer, if not indeed of private prayer 
altogether. 

9 



I 



130 DIVINE PERSONALITY 

But, if we may thus trace in the language of Kant the 
influence of the political traditions of his own country, 
there is another and very different influence which we 
know 21 to have strongly affected his mind, and to which 
we shall find it instructive to advert before we leave this 
discussion of his conception of Morality as Autonomy. 
The influence which I mean is that of Rousseau. Rousseau's 
notion of the volonte generate which is not necessarily the 
volonte de tous 22 is in the direct line of ancestry to Kant's 
conception of the Good Will which, proceeding from the 
universal Reason, constitutes the true worth and is the 
true personality of every one of us and always more truly 
my own will than a selfish will, which is dragged at the 
heels, as it were, of my animal appetites, can possibly be ; 
so that even were every man in fact to err from the right 
path in will and deed, yet what each ought to do would still 
be the only thing in doing which his will would follow its 
own law and thus be able to claim that it was autonomous. 
The volonte generate is in Rousseau's political philosophy 
the will of the Sovereign, and the Sovereign, whose will 
it is, is the People in their collective capacity ; in his private 
capacity each member of this Sovereign is a subject of 
that Sovereign whereof he is in his public capacity as a 
citizen an integral part ; his private will may differ from 
the general will which is his own as a member of the 
Sovereign People ; nay all the private wills together 
(the will of all) may vary from the * general will ' which 
aims only at the common good. 

This conception, translated from the political to the 
ethical plane, would naturally assume the form of Kant's 
Good Will, which m.ay be no one's private will, yet is 

21 See Kant, Fragm. aus dem Nachlasse (H. viii. 624). 
« See Rousseau, Du contrat Social, c. 3. 



THE MORAL LIFE 131 

every man's will in a sense in which no merely private 
will can be. 

But the obligation under which an individual lies of 
obeying the Moral Law, which yet is said by Kant to be 
a self-imposed law, is not in Kant's view dependent on an 
interest which this obedience would serve ; the determina- 
tion of the will to obey it is in fact the only genuine moral 
interest. The chief difference between Kant's own ethical 
theory and that of such a Kantian as Green lies in the 
elevation by the latter of the notion of a Common Good 
to the central position in the theory of Morality and the 
attempt to envisage Obligation as secondary to this. 
Now a view which finds in the ideal of a Common Good 
rather than the consciousness of Duty the ruling principle 
of Morality has gone back as it were from Kant to Rousseau, 
and obliterated the characteristic feature of the Kantian 
doctrine, the emphasis upon Obligation. It, however, 
connects itself with Kant through the conception of 
Autonomy, and thus links the Kantian teaching with a 
democratic political philosophy which traces its own 
descent from Rousseau, and in which the notion of Au- 
thority, the correlative of the notion of Obligation, finds 
but a precarious footing. I venture to think that the 
true corrective for this outstanding defect of such a 
philosophy is to be found in the development of Kant's 
teaching about the consciousness of Obligation along the 
line which is suggested by Martineau, and the recognition 
of this consciousness as the consciousness of a Divine 
Legislator.23 

The theological development which took place within 
Christendom during the nineteenth century has to a great 
extent obviated the danger, his keen perception of which 
23 Cp. G. Frommel, La Foi (D61e, 1900), p. 10. 



132 DIVINE PERSONALITY 

had much to do with holding Kant back from such a 
recognition. In consequence of the progress of BibUcal 
criticism and of the historical and comparative study 
of religions, the affirmation of a Divine Legislator directly 
revealed in our conscience or consciousness of obligation 
is far less likely than in Kant's own day to be interpreted 
as opening the door to the assertion that all the commands 
attributed to God in Scripture or ecclesiastical tradition 
may claim the obedience challenged by the " manifest 
authority " of Conscience, or to speak more properly, of 
the object of Conscience, — the Moral Law. 

But in any case there is in philosophy no justification 
for allowing the possibility (or even the probability) that 
erroneous inferences may be drawn from a truth to hinder 
us from a candid statement of the facts as we find them ; 
and, unless I am greatly mistaken, these certainly favour 
the assertion that in our consciousness of obHgation we are 
aware of an imponent of the obligation whom we must 
reverence as other than ourselves and as not merely 
superior to us but supreme over us, even though, in virtue 
of the unconditional acceptance of the obligation by our 
reason, that which he imposes may be intelligibly spoken 
of as self-imposed. We must acknowledge in obligation, 
as it has been put,24 an aspect not only of autonomy, 
but also of a heteronomy, v/hich turns out on inspection 
to be really a theonomy. Such a heteronomy, however, 
is not a heteronomy in Kant's sense ; for, as we have all 
along insisted, it is involved in our notion of God that he 
is immanent in our reason and will, which notwith- 
standing he transcends. 

34 Julius Miiller, Christian Doctrine of Sin, Eng. tr. i. p. 8i ; 
cp. C6sar Malan fils, as reported by G. Frommel in the article 
quoted above. 



THE MORAL LIFE 133 

It is a familiar and a just criticism of a certain kind of 
idealistic theology that nothing is gained by merely trans- 
ferring to a Divine Mind the creation of the object of 
knowledge by the act of knowing it, which it has been 
found impossible to maintain in the case of finite minds. 25 
It may be suggested that a like criticism might be directed 
against the arguments which have here been put forward 
in support of the view that our moral experience is a 
consciousness of ' theonomy/ 

If, we may be asked, it is true that we can no more 
regard the Categorical Imperative of duty as deriving its 
authority from our wills, although only in an act of will 
can we be said, properly speaking, to be conscious of the 
obligation which it lays upon us, than we can regard the 
reality of an object of knowledge as dependent upon 
the act of apprehending it, is there not the same kind of 
difficulty in making God's will the source of moral obliga- 
tion that there is in making God's knowledge the source 
of the reality of that which he knows ? For if what we 
see to be necessary to Knowledge and Will as such, when 
contemplating them in ourselves, is not also necessary 
to them as they are in God, are we not (it may be said) 
playing with the notion of a divine Knowledge and Will 
which are not after all Knowledge and Will in the proper 
sense at all ? 

I think, however, that this criticism overlooks some 
essential features of the situation. Even in respect 
of knowledge, there is indeed a real difficulty in conceiv- 
ing a perfect or divine Intelligence as related no otherwise 



25 Cp. a paper On Some Recent Movements in Philosophy con- 
sidered in Relation to the Philosophy of Religion, in Transactions 
of the Third International Congress for the History of Religions, 
Oxford, 1908, ii. pp. 416 ff. 



134 DIVINE PERSONALITY 

to its object than a finite intelligence is related to that 
which it apprehends. It was to meet this difficulty 
that Aristotle, for example, was constrained to describe 
the divine Mind as having no object but its own activity 
of knowing. 26 But not only do we, in our own knowing, 
inevitably regard the object of our knowledge as inde- 
pendent of the act of knowing it, but the representation 
of this object as a divine thought, whatever advantage 
we may find it to have when we go on to construct a 
metaphysical or theological system, has, I think we must 
admit, no direct significance for us when we are merely 
trying to describe the activity of Knowledge as it exists 
in ourselves. But while we are, as it seems to me, unable 
to think of an act as right because we will it, our attitude 
towards the Moral Law is, as we have already seen, 
an attitude which we can scarcely describe satisfactorily 
except as one towards a Personal Lawgiver. Yet the 
moment that we attempt to distinguish in the will of this 
Personal Lawgiver the object which he wills from the 
will itself (so that we could conceive him as willing what 
we should not regard as obligatory ^7), it ceases to be the 
authority of which the moral experience is the conscious- 
ness. The conception of a Supreme Being who is not 
merely good but is the Good ^8 is thus for the student of 
Morality not a speculation suggested by the desire (however 
legitimate and even inevitable that desire may be) to 
work out the thought of a Perfect Intelligence, but it 
is urged upon him in the course of reflexion upon the 
facts of the moral experience itself. 29 

2^ vonoiQ vor](TsojQ, Ar. Met. A 9, 1074 b 34, 1075 a 10. 

27 Could we so conceive him, we might have to echo J. S. Mill's 
famous protest, Exam, of Hamilton, p. 124. 

28 Cp. God and Personality I., pp. 237 f. 

29 We may recognize here, of course, the thought expressed by 
Kant in making God, Freedom and Immortality problems for the 
Theoretical, but postulates for the Practical Reason. 



THE MORAL LIFE 135 

The recognition for which I have pleaded of the con- 
sciousness of ObHgation as in its essence a consciousness 
of God will, I think, be found to have important conse- 
quences in the sphere of political philosophy. Thoughtful 
observers of contemporary public life can scarcely avoid 
having forced upon their attention the existence of a very 
general uncertainty as to the claim of constituted authority 
upon the submission and reverence of the members of 
the body politic. Under the name of ' democracy * 
a principle corresponding to that of ' autonomy ' in the 
Kantian ethics is commonly put forward as the foundation 
of all legitimate power in the State ; and the use in certain 
connexions of the expression ' self-determination ' in a 
sense intimately allied with that given in current phrase- 
ology to ' democracy ' emphasizes the close affinity of 
the view now prevalent of political liberty with that of 
moral freedom held by Kant and the thinkers of his 
school. 

If in the word * autonomy ' as used by Kant there lay 
the possibility of a misinterpretation which, by not hold- 
ing fast to Kant's doctrine of two distinguishable selves 
in every man, should pervert his meaning, and give us for 
his doctrine of complete disinterestedness one of such 
egoism as we find, for example, in the celebrated work of 
Max Stirner, far greater is the danger of such misinter- 
pretation when we pass from the region of individual 
duty to that of political obligation. 

For while in the sphere of the individual's moral life 
the frequent incompatibility of duty and pleasure is 
obvious, and there is even a tendency — found, as is well 
known, in Kant himself — to exaggerate its frequency, 
in the sphere of Politics the pursuit of the general happi- 
ness may be so plausibly represented as the whole content 



136 DIVINE PERSONALITY 

of public duty, the sole end of public action, that it is 
especially easy here first to think of a * common good ' 
rather than of a ' common obligation/ and then to inter- 
pret this ' common good ' in terms which really in the 
end are terms of individual happiness or pleasure. In 
this way the principle of Authority comes to be dissolved, 
and of the two aspects of the political community which 
at one period obtained historical expression in the rival 
theories of the ' social contract ' and of the ' divine right 
of kings ' respectively we lose sight of the latter altogether. 
Yet I venture to think that both these aspects must be 
kept in view if we are to realize a social unity which will 
be satisfactory to our moral consciousness. 

It is not perhaps altogether needless to remark that 
the rival theories to which I have just referred were not 
only one-sided in their emphasis on one or the other of 
two equally necessary aspects of the fact which they 
sought to explain, but presented the aspect emphasized 
in a context of very disputable and in truth irrelevant 
matter. It is on account of this commingling of what 
is of permanent value in them with something of very 
inferior worth that both are apt to seem to the men of 
our age obsolete and fantastic. The notion of a primitive 
compact, of which no one can assign the date or describe 
the circumstances, binding upon all the descendants of 
its unknown framers ; or again the notion of an inherent 
and indefeasible right of a person designated by a parti- 
cular rule of hereditary succession to demand obedience 
from his fellow men — such notions are so little congenial 
to the minds of our contemporaries that the truths with 
which they were mixed are apt to be disregarded along 
with them. 
Yet such truths they did contain : the doctrine of social 



THE MORAL LIFE 137 

contract, the truth that without consent there is no legiti- 
mate authority ; and the doctrine of divine right, the truth 
that the conception of authority with its correlative obli- 
gation cannot be deduced from that of consent, but de- 
rives from an ultimate experience of the human spirit 
incapable of explanation in terms of anything other than 
itself. These two truths correspond, as will be at once 
perceived, with the two aspects of the moral fact described 
by a writer whom I quoted in an earlier part of this 
Lecture the one as autonomy and the other as a heteronomy 
which turns out to be a theonomy. 

And as with the principle of authority in the moral 
law to which the individual knows himself to be subject 
beyond all possibility of contracting himself out of his 
allegiance, so with the principle of Authority in the 
community. I am convinced that no other explanation 
will be found in the last resort satisfactory but one 
which exhibits it as the presence of God to the soul 
which is made in his image, after his likeness. Thus 
the legitimate authority in the community will have in 
the strictest sense of the word a ' divine right ' to the 
obedience of its members ; but that authority alone can 
be described as legitimate which is established by consent, 
just as in the individual's moral life the only way by which 
I can know the command of God to be his is by the re- 
cognition that this and nothing else can I will, in Kant's 
phrase, * as law universal/ that is to say disinterestedly, 
and as what it is not merely pleasant but right that I 
should do. So indispensable to the morality of the action 
is this personal recognition of the obligation that the 
obligation may be intelligibly said to be s^Z/-imposed ; 
at the same time this very recognition is a recognition 
of the source of obligation as the supreme and absolute 



138 DIVINE PERSONALITY 

Lawgiver over all rational beings, and this I cannot with- 
out absurdity say that I myself am. Yet my subjection 
to this supreme Lawgiver in no way impairs my freedom, 
since it is only through my free choice of the right that 
I am conscious of his demands upon me ; thus it can be 
said that " God's service is perfect freedom, "30 or, in the 
yet stronger phrase of the Latin original of the collect 
whence these words are taken, he is one cui servire est 
regnare; in subjection to the Sovereign of the empire 
of beings who are ends in themselves his subjects are made 
sharers of his sovereignty. 

In the common or poHtical Hfe of man— and, as Plato 
has taught us,3i we see writ large in the structure of the 
community what is writ, as it were in lesser letters, in the 
structure of the individual soul— we see this same fact 
of obHgation exhibiting the like dual structure. Yet, 
to carry on the Platonic figure, there is a sense in which 
the Hues of the larger writing are less deHcately and 
accurately drawn than those of the smaller. The indivi- 
dual soul finds himself face to face with a law which he 
may take to be none other than God's, but it is only in 
a primitive stage of civihzation that the law which the 
citizen is expected to obey and the authority which makes 
it and enforces it present themselves as immediately and 
in themselves divine. In different periods and in different 
societies, the precise relation to God of the law and 
of the government which administers this law are variously 
conceived. 

It would be a mistake to suppose that, as a matter of 
history, the view which has often obtained in modern 
times that a binding law must be regarded as the enact- 

3» Collect for Peace in the Anglican service of Morning Prayer 
i^Rep. ii. 368 D ff. 



THE MORAL LIFE 139 

ment of a definite person or body of persons, constituting 
the sovereign power in the community and therefore, 
as the Sovereign, competent to change at will any part of 
this law, is either a universal or a primitive view. On 
the contrary we more often find the Law regarded in 
earlier times as something which, so to say, runs of itself 
in the society and of which the rulers are only the guardians 
and administrators. The difficulty which this manner 
of conceiving Law, common as it was in antiquity and 
in the middle ages, is apt to present to legal theorists of 
a later time, is due, I think, not merely to a lack of histori- 
cal knowledge and sympathy in these theorists, but also 
to the stronger sense of Personality which marks a more 
advanced stage of spiritual development. When the 
sense of Personality was weaker than it has since become, 
it was easier to think of the Law as binding upon us with- 
out raising the question. Who was its author ? To a* 
later age it might appear natural that, if not attributed 
to any human author, it must at least have been regarded 
as proceeding from God. But this was not necessarily 
or always so, though the higher the conception of God 
rose the less easy was it to evade the question of his 
relation to it. 

Even in Judaism, where one would certainly expect 
to find entertained the notion of the Law as deriving all 
its binding force from the mere will of God, this way of 
looking at it is by no means the only one adopted. The 
son of Sirach 3^ personifies the Law of Moses in terms 
which Christian theologians could apply to the second 
Person of their Trinity ; and the Rabbis could talk of 
God as himself studying and observing that law. No 
doubt their language was not meant to be taken literally ; 
32 Ecclesiasticus, xxiv. 



140 DIVINE PERSONALITY 

it was only intended to express vividly and forcibly the 
Jewish doctors' estimate of their sacred code as possessing 
eternal and immutable vahdity. But their phraseology 
may serve to impress upon our minds that if, even under 
a rehgion of which a strict monotheism was the funda- 
mental article, men could fall so easily into a way of 
speaking of Law as something binding of itself, it is no 
wonder that where religions prevailed which laid no such 
stress on the recognition of one supreme God, Law might 
well be regarded as divinely authoritative without being 
definitely envisaged as the statute or ordinance of a divine 
Legislator. 

With the strengthening, however, of the sense of Per- 
sonality, the time came at which the notion of an imper- 
sonal Law was found less satisfying, and it seemed reason- 
able to inquire after a personal imponent, human or 
divine. By this time, however, both the conception 
of the divine nature and knowledge of past history had 
alike advanced too far to encourage the direct attribution 
to God of the whole law obeyed by a poHtical community ; 
while the officials whose function was to declare, adminis- 
ter, or execute the law, were no longer (as in ages when the 
notions of absolute supremacy and perfect goodness 
were not yet associated so closely with divinity) regarded 
as themselves divine or of divine descent ; at the most 
they might be held to reign ' by the grace of God ' and 
claim a divine sanction for their authority. 

A proof of this divine sanction was, However, needed; and 
in the absence of a supernatural or miraculous attestation, 
and with the weakening of confidence in such evidence as 
could be afforded by ecclesiastical approval or by argu- 
ments of the kind illustrated in the famous work of Filmer, 
to refute which Locke wrote the former of his Two 



THE MORAL LIFE 141 

Treatises of Government, it was inevitable that resort should 
be had to the principle of consent. There was nothing 
indeed novel or unfamiliar about this principle. Indeed 
the theory of the Roman imperial jurisprudence had from 
the first traced the authority of the Prince to the People's 
transference of their sovereign rights to Augustus ; and 
the imperial dignity, the highest in rank of all European 
magistracies, the only one indeed which claimed to 
be, in Dante's sense of the word, a Monarchy, had always 
been elective. But the principle of consent was at last 
left alone in possession of the field, and we have now to 
inquire whether it is compatible with a view which 
ascribes neither to the Law nor to those who administer 
and execute it any authority which is not derived from the 
consent of those who are subject to it or their representa- 
tives to entertain towards the Law itself or towards the 
government which enforces it a sentiment of reverence 
identical with or akin to that challenged by the Law 
which speaks in conscience to the individual soul, and 
which we have seen that we can best understand when we 
take it for a revelation of God, and the experience in which 
it is apprehended as an experience of personal intercourse 
with the Supreme Being. For only, I feel convinced, if 
such a sentiment of reverence can rightly be directed to- 
wards the authorities of the body politic, can obedience 
to them be in the long run justified on any other ground 
than mere self-interest. 

If, however, there is any value in the reasonings of the 
earlier part of this Lecture, this sentiment of Reverence 
towards law and government can only be satisfactorily 
explained by the recognition that here, as in the moral 
consciousness of the individual, we find ourselves subject 
to a ' categorical imperative * (to use Kant's celebrated 



142 DIVINE PERSONALITY 

phrase) ; while the consciousness of this ' categorical 
imperative ' we shall here, as there, hold to be best des- 
scribed as an experience of the Presence of God. We 
have seen that our individual consciousness of obligation 
includes a factor which we may call with Kant autonomy, 
and a factor to which our sentiment of reverence corre- 
sponds and which has been called theonomy. If we recog- 
nize that political obligation also involves the second of 
these factors we shall see in the principle of consent, 
which is the ruling idea of what is nowadays called ' de- 
mocracy,' the form assumed in this sphere by the prin- 
ciple we have previously described as autonomy. 

For (as I have elsewhere put it) '' only where the members 
of a community freely choose or accept for themselves 
the person or persons in whom the sovereign authority 
is reposed, is there an adequate security that this person 
or these persons, since they are not of different clay 
from those who are to be in subjection to them, will 
be able to appeal to a sense that the government has 
authority and can claim loyalty and obedience from its 
subjects. In other words the true ground of preference 
of free and popular institutions over despotic law lies 
not in this : that no one is really under obligation to obey 
any authority but one which is ultimately his own ; but 
in this : that only where he has himself a say in appointing 
or accepting the vehicles of that authority can he be 
counted upon to acquiesce in their authority as — not 
his own — but the best representative he can find of God's. 
The one-sided doctrine of the divine right of kings, that 
is to say, embodied one half of the true doctrine of politi- 
cal obligation, while the one-sided doctrine of the rights 
of man embodied the other. In the process of reaction 
from the error which invested certain particular modes 



THE MORAL LIFE 143 

of selecting the supreme authorities in the community 
with a reUgious sanctity, it is apt to be forgotten that 
there is a sense in which authority is not really authori- 
tative at all unless it be essentially God's and not our 
own ir^any sense in which we can at all contrast our own 
with God's." 33 

I am thus at one with Mr. H. G. Wells — as represented 
by the remarkable book on which I commented in another 
connexion in the sixth Lecture of my first course — in 
regarding the true nature of political authority as theo- 
cratic ; although my view of the God whose authority 
it is differs from his. I do not, however, perceive any 
such inconsistency as he seems to find with this main 
principle in the maintenance of a monarchical form of 
government. Such a form of government may rest as 
well as any other on the consent which is necessary to 
give to the community so governed the character of 
freedom or self-determination corresponding to the 
autonomy of the individual moral choice ; while it is 
perhaps especially well qualified to bring before the 
imagination that other character of authority, in which 
it is representative of God. And as the apostle asks 34 
how one who loves not his brother whom he hath seen 
can love God whom he hath not seen, so we may at least 
think that loyalty to a visible king may be not the worst 
training in loyalty to him whom Mr. Wells rightly de- 
scribes as the ultimate recipient of all true loyalty, * God 
the invisible King.' A comprehension of the former 
sentiment must indeed be presupposed in any appeal 
on behalf of the latter. 

The conclusion then which I would draw from the 

33 In Time of War, p. 51. 

34 I John iv. 20. 



144 DIVINE PERSONALITY 

considerations which have occupied us in this Lecture 
is that the conception of Divine Personahty not only 
harmonizes very well with the ethical interest of man- 
kind, but throws a light upon the nature of the funda- 
mental moral experience, the consciousness of obligation 
which no other conception of the ultimate Reality can 
afford. 

In our study of this experience we found ourselves 
led to include under it not only the experience of the 
Moral Law in the individual conscience but the notion 
of obligation in the political sphere. 

My next Lecture, the sixth of the course, will deal in 
the first place with the relation of the conception of 
Divine Personality in its relation to that of collective or 
corporate personality. This latter conception has played 
a large part both in political and in religious thought ; 
and examination of it from the point of view here adopted 
wdll form a convenient transition to the discussion of the 
place of the conception of Divine Personality in the 
religious life, which will occupy the seventh Lecture and 
close the portion of this course allotted to the investiga- 
tion of the bearing of the conclusions reached in my 
former course upon the attitudes connected with the 
various forms of activity exhibited by the human spirit. 



LECTURE VI 

DIVINE PERSONALITY AND THE POLITICAL 

LIFE 

Although in the last Lecture we were led to speak at 
some length of a problem of Political Philosophy, it was 
because that problem was in the most intimate manner 
connected with a problem of individual Ethics. We 
have now, however, to turn our attention to the social 
or political activity of the human spirit, and to inquire 
into the bearing upon it of those conclusions respecting 
Personality in God to which the reasonings of the first 
course of Lectures conducted us. And here we shall 
find ourselves confronted with a notion which has played 
no small part in the history of both political and religious 
thought — I mean the conception of corporate or collective 
Personality. It will be our task in the present Lecture 
to consider this notion, its significance and validity, 
and the relation of the Personality which may be 
attributed to a State or other community of human 
beings to the Personality of the individual members of 
such a community on the one hand and on the other to 
such personality as may be ascribed to God. 

Man, said Aristotle, ^ is a social animal, ttoXltikov Zifov- 
A human being who should be able to dispense with 
social life would show himself thereby to be not in fact 
I Pol. i. 2. 1253 a 3. 

10 i« 



146 DIVINE PERSONALITY 

human at all; but either above or below humanity, 
ri Oeoq ri OripLov, a god or a beast. The suggestion 
contained in this celebrated observation that the Divine 
nature, unlike the human, is not social is one that other 
passages of Aristotle's writings show to have been more 
than a passing thought with him. In the tenth book of 
the Nicomachean Ethics 2 he surprises those whom the 
earlier portions of that treatise have accustomed to the 
thought that the only self-sufficiency attainable or desir- 
able by a human being is one which leaves him still a focus 
of social relationships, and that the most advantageous 
field of his praiseworthy activities is the closely knit 
political community of a Greek city-state, by alleging it 
as a note of the superiority of the life of Knowledge 
to the life of Action that here less than anywhere else is 
a man dependent upon his fellows for the exercise of his 
activity ; for so he is all the nearer to that supreme inde- 
pendence of anything in any sense beyond itself which, 
in Aristotle's view, must characterize the life of God. 
It was precisely this feature of the Aristotelian theology 
which, as I contended in the third Lecture of my previous 
course, justified us in refusing to call Aristotle's God, 
although undoubtedly conceived by him to be an ' indivi- 
dual centre of consciousness,' by the name of a * personal 
God ' ; since he is without social relationships of any kind, 
whether internal (such as are affirmed by the Christian 
doctrine of the Trinity) or external (such as those which 
are mentioned in Lotze's description of the Supreme 
Being as *' a living Love that wills the blessedness of 
others," 3 and which appear at any rate to be presupposed 
in the religious experience of communion with God). 

- Eth. Nic. X. 7. 1 177 a 27 ff. 

3 Microcosmus, ix. 5, ^ 7 (Eng. tr. ii. p. 721). 



THE POLITICAL LIFE 147 

A wholly unsocial being of this kind could not be called 
personal ; for Personality is always social. But while 
a subject of external social relations may certainly be 
called a person, it is less obvious that a subject of internal 
social relations can be so called ; and indeed, as we have 
already observed, the traditional language of Christian 
theology does not describe its triune God as a person. 
The expression has, however, sometimes been used of 
communities which possess social relations both internal 
and external ; since they consist of human beings in 
personal relations with one another ; and are related to 
other communities much as the individual members of 
each community are related to one another. It might 
further be suggested that we ought to think of any 
Personality which we can ascribe to God rather as a 
corporate or collective Personality of this sort than as 
a Personality like that which belongs to each of the 
individual members of a society ; and that we could thus 
rightly say that God is in this sense personal, although 
not a person ; unless indeed we were prepared to abandon 
monotheism and think of God as standing over against 
other Gods, as one member among many of a divine 
society. 

What then is meant by attribution of Personality to 
a community such as the State ? It is not by any means 
easy to give a brief answer to this question. 

No doubt it might be said that we have to do here with 
nothing but a figure of speech. It is as easy to personify 
a community as to personify a virtue like Wisdom, or a 
passion like Love, a heavenly body like the Moon, or a 
river like the Thames, as to personify Death or Poetry, 
Philosophy or Fortune. But when we consider the part 
that patriotism and religious loyalty, the ambition and 



148 DIVINE PERSONALITY 

the animosity of nations and churches — not to speak of the 
devotion of men to lesser societies, to colleges and schools, 
parties and clubs — have played in the history of the world, 
we shall scarcely feel this answer to be sufficient. It is 
assuredly no mere care for grace or convenience in literary 
expression which makes us ready not only to speak of 
communities in terms like those which we use of men 
and women, but to identify ourselves in pride or in shame 
with what they do, even where as individuals we have had 
no part in the doing of it, and to sacrifice to what we call 
their interests our own individual pleasure and comfort and 
advantage, nay even our health and our life, with no 
sense that we are thereby surrendering the freedom where- 
in our personal dignity consists, but rather the contrary. 

There is another account of what is meant by attribut- 
ing Personality to a community which is not so obviously 
inadequate as that of which I have just spoken. It may 
be said that the whole explanation of this language is 
to be sought in the fact that communities can be parties 
in a suit at law ; can have rights which can be claimed 
and duties which can be enforced ; and are thus treated 
as persons or rather are persons, so far forth as by a 
person is meant a subject of legal rights and duties. 

According to this view Personality, whether in the 
case of an individual or of a community, is a notion which 
always refers to what has been called ' a world of claims 
and counterclaims,' a lawyer's world, so to say. Hence 
where the band of union between individuals is of a 
nature which excludes the intervention of lawyers, as 
in the family (for, if ' brother goes to law with brother ' 
or husband with wife, we at once recognize that the 
family bond is broken and the marriage well on the way 
to dissolution) — ^in such a union the individual, it is said, 



THE POLITICAL LIFE 149 

parts with his separate personaHty ; while it is not the 
husband apart from the wife or the wife apart from the 
husband, the parents from the children or the children 
from the parents or from one another, but the family 
as a whole that stands over against other families, as a 
person over against other persons, in the world of claims 
and counterclaims to which Personality, by its very notion, 
belongs. 4 

Here however there is something to be observed which 
may well strike us as strange and paradoxical. To 
such a surrender of personal independence as is involved 
in Marriage we attach a high degree of value, just because 
we rate the confidence of mutual love as intrinsically 
something altogether better than the merely legal relation 
which is constituted by belonging to the same ' world of 
claims and counterclaims.' The Greek proverb Koiva 
TO. (pi\(Dv, ' True friends have all things in common,' 
which Plato 5 sought to make the principle of unity in 
his ideal State, gives pointed expression to the thought 
of this supersession in friendship of the legal relation 
which rests upon the distinction of meum and tuum. 
It was the main objection brought by Aristotle against 
his master's scheme that the sentiment of affection, which 
alone could claim to set that distinction at nought, could 
not be expected to admit of extension over so large an 
area as Plato had contemplated, that the friendship 
possible in so wide a circle would be but a " watery friend- 
ship,"^ too greatly diluted to act as a solvent of juristic 
and economic independence. But the Platonic proposal 
and the Aristotelian criticism of it agree in their acknow- 

4 See God and Personality, p. 52. 

5 Rep. iv. 424 A. 

6 vdap^Q ^i\ia. See Pol. ii. 4. 1262 b 15. 



150 DIVINE PERSONALITY 

ledgment of the power of love or friendship, when of a 
certain degree of intensity, to emancipate those whom 
they unite from the restrictions of the ' world of claims 
and counterclaims.' 

Nevertheless, according to the theory which we are now 
discussing, we rise above this world through the intimacies 
of domestic life or of a comradeship only to find ourselves 
in it again as sharers in the corporate or collective per- 
sonality wherein our individual personality has beenl 
merged. Nor is this true only of the family, which may 
be regarded from one point of view, in virtue of its more 
direct dependence upon animal instincts, as inferior in 
rank to communities in whose constitution the Reason 
has played a larger part. Even the State itself, which 
a very important school of thought has represented as 
the supreme community and the fullest expression of 
the social reason of man, finds its inner unity most 
intensely realized in the patriotic enthusiasm which in 
time of war willingly abandons the usual safeguards of 
individual freedom to absorb itself in a common effort. 
And this takes place just when the State as a whole is 
asserting its ' claims and counterclaims ' most strongly 
in controversy with another State. Again, with respect 
to societies intermediate between the family and the 
State, to take one illustration out of many, the history of 
medieval Europe is full of the ' claims and counterclaims ' 
of religious orders and houses, whose individual members 
had renounced all private property and identified them- 
selves for life with the society into which they had retired 
from the layman's world of rights and duties. 

If in the facts which have just been stated we find 
something which seems strange and paradoxical, it is 
because it is impossible to keep the notion of Personality 



THE POLITICAL LIFE 151 

within the bounds of a purely juristic circle of ideas, to 
which it nevertheless undoubtedly belongs. If the word 
* person ' is nowhere applicable except where there is 
a plurality of persons standing to one another in definite 
relations such as are established and maintained by 
laws, it yet carries with it the connotation of the ' warmth 
and intimacy ' 7 which belong to self-consciousness. 
Thus for a society merely to be treated as a possible party 
to legal proceedings seems scarcely sufficient to warrant 
a claim to Personality apart from such a sense of intimacy, 
of belonging in all things to one another, as may be 
wholly absent between the members of a legal corporation, 
but is often conspicuously present in the life of a family, 
and on certain occasions in that of a nation also. 

We are thus compelled in regard to the possession of 
a claim to corporate Personality to recognize two types 
of community, the contrast between which has played a 
considerable part in recent political philosophy. They 
are already distinguished in the famous passage of Burke 
in which he declares that " the State ought not to be 
considered as nothing better than a partnership agreement 
in a trade of pepper and coffee, calico or tobacco, or some 
other such low concern, to be taken up for a little temporary 
interest, and to be dissolved by the fancy of the parties. 
It is to be looked on with other reverence ; because it is 
not a partnership in things subservient only to the gross 
animal existence of a temporary and perishable nature. 
It is a partnership in all science ; a partnership in all art ; 
a partnership in every virtue and in all perfection. As 
the ends of such a partnership cannot be obtained in many 
generations, it becomes a partnership not only between 
those who are living, but between those who are living, 
7 James, Prwciples of Psychology, i. p. 331. 



152 DIVINE PERSONALITY 

those who are dead, and those who are to be born. Each 
contract of each particular state is but a clause in the great 
primeval contract of eternal society, linking the lower 
with the higher natures, connecting the visible and in- 
visible world, according to a fixed compact sanctioned 
by the inviolable oath which holds all physical and all 
moral natures, each in their appointed place." ^ 

The two types of community which are here contrasted 
have also been opposed to one another as true corporate 
personalities to mere personce fictce. The persona ficta 
is merely the creation of law ; its ' personality ' is in the 
proper sense a ' fiction ' and exists merely for the purposes 
of convenience ; it is defined by the act of the legislative 
authority to which it owes its being, and cannot do or 
suffer anything which that act does not declare it capable 
of doing or suffering. There is thus in it no principle, 
no possibility of growth or development. As Maitland, 
following Gierke, has pointed out, 9 it is agreeable to the 
traditions of the Roman Law as developed by the Italian 
commentators of the middle ages to see in all the cor- 
porations which it recognized, the State alone excepted, 
nothing but such personce fictce. In certain celebrated 
cases in the recent history of Great Britain, such as that 
about the right of the United Free Church of Scotland 
to property which belonged to the Free Church before its 
union with the United Presbyterian Church, and again 
that known by the name of the Taff Vale case, about 
the right of Trades Unions to employ their funds for 
political purposes, it was the question at issue whether 
a Church or a Trade Union is not after all something 

8 Reflections on the Revolution in France {Works, ed. 1882, ii. 
p. 368). 

9 See Maitland's Introduction to his translation of Gierke's 
Political Theories of the Middle Age. 



THE POLITICAL LIFE 153 

more than a mere persona fictUy bound hand and foot by 
the terms of a trust deed or of articles of registration ; 
whether it may not be entitled, like a real person, to 
develop its views, to reinterpret its thought, to change its 

I mind, and yet continue the same ' person ' that it was 
before. There is no doubt of course that the State claims 
for itself this liberty, which its judicial representatives 
are apt to deny to other corporations within the area 
which it controls. This is not the place to enter upon 
a discussion of these claims, whether in the instances 

! quoted or in others which might be alleged. It is plain 
that recognition of the true personality of a particular 

I corporation would not by itself necessarily decide its 
right to a particular property. For even an individual 
person might have money left to him for certain specific 
purposes and afterwards might change so much that he 
would be incapable of carrying them out. But on the 
other hand the view which sees in a corporation a mere 
creature of the law, definable in terms of its trust deeds 
or articles of association, undoubtedly excludes the 
possibility of the kind of change which seems inseparable 
from the development of a true finite personality. The 
cases of doubt to which reference has been made have 
been mentioned merely to illustrate the fact that, while 
some corporations may be no more than personce fictce 
and can claim personality only in a purely legal sense, 
in others the members are conscious of a unity which 
is much more like that of an individual personality 
than the unity of merely fictitious persons can be. To 
this sort of corporation the old jest does not apply 
that a corporation has neither a soul to be damned 
nor a body to be kicked ; for they may do things which 
may deeply wound the conscience of men and women 



154 DIVINE PERSONALITY 

who have yet no individual responsibility for them ; and 
the material symbols or instruments of their activity may 
be handled in a way which is felt by their incorporators 
not, it is true, as physical pain, but yet with the same sense 
of indignity which would be experienced on his own 
account by a man who had been publicly horsewhipped. 

In their desire to emphasize such facts as these some have, 
over-hastily as it seems to me, ventured to speak of a 
real corporate personality as though it were another 
person beside the persons of the individual members of 
the corporation. Legally it may be correct to say that 
such another person exists ; but if this legal statement 
is treated as a metaphysical truth, we seem to be back 
among the sophistries against which Aristotle was wont 
to bring the celebrated argument of the ' third man.' '** 
No more than the universal is to be treated as another 
particular beside the particulars which are its instances, 
is the corporation (or the crowd) to be treated as another 
person beside the persons who are its members ; nor does 
the unquestionable fact that men gathered in crowds or 
organized in societies act otherwise than the same men 
would act apart warrant one in such neglect of differences 
which are no less real than the identities whereon by 
the use of such phraseology the whole stress is laid. 

We shall find it to be the fact that ' personahty ' has 
generally been ascribed to a society, in other than a merely 
legal sense, by way of emphasizing the inadequacy of some 
other description of its nature. It is just as with the term 
' organism,' which has also been applied to some societies 
in order to indicate that they are not mere assemblies, 
or even mere creatures of contract, but that they change 
in definite directions without a deliberate intention on 
10 Ar. Metaph. A. 9, 990 b 17. 



THE POLITICAL LIFE 155 

the part of any individual member, much as vege- 
table and animal bodies without taking thought ' add 
to their stature ' or otherwise go through a series of 
changes fitting them for the discharge of their specific 
functions. In this negative or at most analogous sense, 
the word * organism ' may be conveniently used of a society ; 
but that it is dangerous to take it as literally applicable 
is clearly seen in the merely fanciful comparisons in 
which Herbert Spencer (for example) was led to indulge 
when attempting to do so. 

I do not indeed hold — as will be clear from what I have 
already said concerning corporate personality — that the 
word * personality ' when applied to a society is as merely 
metaphorical as ' organism ' applied in the same way. 
On the contrary I hold the doctrine of Plato's Republic 
to be true, that the structure of the individual soul is 
repeated in that of society, and that the individual soul 
first learns what its own structure is as writ large in the 
community. A State (and a State need not be the only 
society of which we can say this), though its behaviour 
may often remind us of that of such a body, is not an 
animal or vegetable body, but is in its essence a rational 
and spiritual being, giving effect to its will by action, 
through material instruments, in and upon the material 
world. 

Yet if we go on to say without qualification that there- 
fore it may be called a person, we must be careful lest we 
repeat the mistake of those who have taken too literally 
the statement that it is an organism. The Swiss jurist 
Bluntschli is not less fantastic in his treatment of the 
theme of the Personality of the State " than is Herbert 

" Theory of the State (Eng. tr. of his Lehre vom modernen Staat), 
P- 23. 



156 DIVINE PERSONALITY 

Spencer in his elaboration of its organic nature ; and 
he does not, as the English thinker has done, take back 
in a sudden perception of his mistake the extravagances 
which he has been betrayed into offering as serious con- 
tributions to political theory. " Everything," as Butler 
said, " is what it is and not another thing, "12 and a society 
is not (except in a merely legal sense) a person, though, 
as Plato showed, there is nothing in it which does not 
express an interest or an impulse which is a factor in the 
personal life of some of its members. I cannot better 
express what I take to be the truth about this matter 
than by quoting the account given of it by my immediate 
predecessor in this Lectureship, an account with which 
I find myself in substantial agreement. 

*' The phrase * the social mind ' is not," so says Professor 
Sorley, *' a mere metaphor. But the unity of the social 
mind is of a different kind from the unity of the individual 
mind. The limits of the latter are determined by cir- 
cumstances which are largely social, but the content is 
all related to a central point, an inner or subjective unity 
of feeling, striving, and apprehension, which is the first 
condition of there being any mental life at all, and which 
neither psychology nor sociology has been able to explain. 
With the social mind it is different. Its unity is a contract 
which can be traced historically. Social factors must 
always be assumed, but social unity is a growth in time 
and it does not start from a principle such as the subject 
of individual life, without which the existence of his mental 
experience is inconceivable." ^3 I should myself rather say, 
with Plato, that it starts, not indeed from " a principle 
such as the subject of individual life," but from that 

12 Butler, Preface to the Sermons. 

13 Moral Values and the Idea of God, p. 130 f. 



THE POLITICAL LIFE 157 

principle itself, without which the existence, not only 
of the individual's mental experience, but of the social 
unity itself, is inconceivable ; for the social unity is rooted 
in the mental experience of individuals. 

The thought may not improbably suggest itself at this 
point that in the conception of corporate personality 
which we have just been discussing may be found the 
clue to that of Divine Personality which is the principal 
topic of these Lectures. We have already admitted that 
alike in speaking of Divine ' personality ' and in speaking 
of corporate ' personality,' we are using the word ' person- 
ahty ' in a way which does not allow us to assum.e that 
all which is true of individual human ' personality ' will 
be true if transferred to a society or to God. In parti- 
cular we have observed that what Professor Sorley calls 
'' an inner or subjective unity of feeling, striving, and 
apprehension " is of the essence of individual Personality, 
but has no analogue in corporate Personality ; and I 
have elsewhere contended that the evidence of Divine 
Personality lies in the religious experience of personal 
intercourse or communion with God, not in any insight 
which we possess into the nature of the divine self-con- 
sciousness. It might seem then as though Divine Personal- 
ity might be conceived as analogous to the Personalit}^ 
of a nation or State ; and as if the union in God of ' tran- 
scendence ' with * immanence ' might be adequately con- 
ceived after the fashion of a like union in the case of the 
nation or State, towards which its members can exhibit 
loyalty and love and devoted service, and which yet 
lives only in and through the lives of the very citizens 
from whom such loyalty and love and service are demanded 
and obtained. 

Moreover there are various facts in the history of 



158 DIVINE PERSONALITY 

Religion which may seem to afford support to such a 
train of reasoning. At a certain stage of rehgious deve- 
lopment we find each people worshipping as a God the 
spirit of its own common life. It distinguishes this spirit 
from itself, and pays it divine honours ; but in this 
representation of it as a person inhabiting some sacred 
shrine in the midst of the people whose God it is, we 
are apt to see only a creature of the popular imagination. 
We cannot believe in the objective validity of the Virgin 
of the Athenian Acropolis, of Chemosh the god (or, as 
the Israelites called him, the abomination) of Moab, or 
indeed even of Jahveh, the God of the Israelites them- 
selves, who came into the camp when the ark was carried 
into it and who dwelt in the thick darkness of the most 
holy place at Jerusalem.^ We take it as a matter of 
course that the interviews of Scipio with the deities of 
the Roman Senate ^5 were a politic invention on the part 
of the conqueror of Hannibal ; and the phrase which 
the other day was so familiar to us, der alte deutsche Gott, 
(though perhaps it was not intended to mean much more 
than the expression * God of our fathers ' which we have 
certainly not shrunk ourselves from using) struck English 
readers of the late German Emperor's speeches as absurd 
if not blasphemous in its apparent reversion to a style 
of theology which has become for us impossible. 

I have no intention of denying the real historical con- 
nexion between the personification of the spirit of the 
community which we see in the local tribal and national 
deities of the ancient world and the religious experience 
of personal communion with God which is, for me, the 
sole genuine evidence of Divine Personality. The con- 

M I Sam. iv. 7 ; i Kings viii. I2. 
15 See Liv. xxvi. 19, 



THE POLITICAL LIFE 159 

sciousness whether of the world as a whole, or of God, 
in the sense which that word bears for us, for whom it 
must mean, if it is to mean anything, the Highest, not 
only in some restricted sphere but in the world as a whole — 
this consciousness is mediated to man from the first 
through the consciousness of his group. To quote words 
which I have used elsewhere about one aspect of the 
* idea of God : ' " The conception of a divine reason 
first dawns upon the human mind in the form of a con- 
ception of a collective or social reason which the individual 
shares with his fellows. It first becomes distinguished 
from the conception of a merely social or collective reason, 
when the individual attains the level of development 
at which he not only sees in that which all his fellows 
recognize as valid or desirable the really or objectively 
valid, the really or objectively desirable, but comes to 
recognize that something may be really and objectively 
valid or desirable which not only he but his whole group 
fail to accept or desire." ^^ 

In the history of Israel we find indeed that it was 
precisely such lines as these that religious development 
followed. The very failures and disappointments which 
shook the national trust in the partiality of the national 
God for the community which was called by his name 
led the prophets of the nation to conceive him as the 
Judge of all the earth and to lay the foundations of the 
universal religion, whose worship is neither in Jerusalem 
nor in Gerizim, but in spirit and in truth.^7 

As however, with the enlargement of the religious 
horizon, if I may so express it, the worship once paid to 
the tribal deity is seen to be due to a God whom the heaven 

i6 Group Theories of Religion, pp. 159, 160. 
*7 John iv. 21. 



160 DIVINE PERSONALITY 

of heavens cannot contain, there inevitably follows a 
withdrawal from the spirit of the community, as such, 
of that personal character which was attributed to it when 
identified with the Object of religious veneration. This 
is, as I take it, the true account of what may plausibly 
be represented as the gradual evolution of a religion which 
will ultimately dispense with Divine Personality as it 
grows accustomed to the thought that devotion to a 
community whereof one is a member requires for its 
justification no personal embodiment, whether in a 
king or in a god. 

What we have to note is that it is exceedingly doubtful 
whether nothing is lost in our attitude to a community 
when we realize that it is only by a figure of speech that 
we can be said to have personal intercourse with it. It 
is the justification of Kingship as an institution which 
the freest of commonwealths may on that account well 
retain that the unquestionably real personality of the Head 
of the State, who symbolizes its unity and its tradition, 
supplies something which is lacking in the State itself ; 
for the State, though it really possesses the unity and 
the tradition of which the King is but the symbol, does 
not possess them in a form which the individual citizen 
recognizes as a personality no less genuine than his own. 
This reflexion (though Hegel ^^ may be quoted in support 
of it) will be, I am well aware, w^holly unacceptable to a 
school which is often by its critics called after his name 
and which highly reveres his memory. For in making 
it I am certainly assigning to individual personality a 
higher value in comparison with the personality which 
can be attributed to a community than this school is 
commonly ready to grant to it. I shall not, however, enter 

i8 See Philosophie des Rechts, § 279 {Werke, viii. pp. 361 foil.). 



THE POLITICAL LIFE 161 

here upon a defence of my estimate against the thinkers 
whom I have in mind, for the subject will come before 
us again in a later Lecture of this course. All that I 
now wish to point out is that to the sense of something 
lacking in the ' personality ' of the community is in my 
judgment due not only the satisfaction still so widely 
felt in the recognition of a single person (to use the Crom- 
welHan phrase), who can act as the representative of the 
community in its claim to the loyalty of its members; 
but also that deification in earlier days of the spirit of 
the community of which I have already mentioned several 
prominent historical examples. 

Of the conception of corporate PersonaUty it may then 
be said that, so far from conflicting with the acknowledg- 
ment of PersonaUty in God, it points with no uncertain 
finger to such an acknowledgment. As we saw in the 
last Lecture that our attitude toward the authority of 
the State finds its only satisfactory explanation in the 
recognition that it is the surrogate of a divine Lawgiver 
and Ruler, who in the consciousness of obhgation is 
revealed as standing in the fulness of personaHty over 
against the finite personahties which reaHze their dignity 
and freedom in submission to him ; so now the primitive 
deification of the spirit of the community of which we are 
members is seen to be the dim consciousness that the 
unity of that common spiritual Hfe, which is found at 
last to be the private possession of no one group of men 
but of all rational beings, is to be sought in a Supreme 
Being, manifesting in conscious personal intercourse the 
full reality of spiritual existence. 

It is fndeed this truth which has received such striking 
expression in the PauHne description of a community 
whose life is nothing less than the Hfe of God, since it is 



162 DIVINE PERSONALITY 

the body of one " in whom dwelleth all the fulness of the 
Godhead bodily." ^9 

The individual person is always a member of society ; 
it is indeed, as we have often had occasion to observe, 
in virtue of his social activities that he comes to be called 
a ' person,' although (reading over in the small letters 
what we have learned to read in the large, according to 
the precept of Plato) we may come to recognize that in 
these activities a certain kind of subjectivity, inwardness, 
self-consciousness finds its function and expression. The 
life of God is always mediated to such individual persons 
through a society, for it is easy to see that even the mystic 
who flies ' alone to the Alone '^o is conditioned in all that 
he says and does by the intellectual and spiritual inherit- 
ance of the community to which he belongs. The mediat- 
ing society, considered apart from the life which it mediates 
to its members, is not indeed personal in the same genuine 
and primary sense in which its members are personal ; 
but the true subject and source of that hfe m-ust be con- 
ceived, if it is to be conceived in a manner adequate to 
the demands of the rehgious consciousness, as possessing 
the fulness of Personality. 

Now in the theology of the rehgion which has taken 
most seriously the conception of Divine Personality, 
this Personahty is represented (to employ words which 
I have used elsewhere ^^) as a complete self-consciousness 
or personahty, the fulfilment or archetype of what we 
have imperfectly manifested in our individual selves. 
For in ourselves we recognize the self as contrasted with 
a not-self, which is thus the necessary complement 

19 Col. ii. 9. Cp. my Problems in.the Relations of God and Man, 

p. 230. 

20 Plotinus, Enn,, vi. 9, § 11. . ■ x 
ai Problems, pp. 234 «• (with slight changes and omissions). 



I 



THE POLITICAL LIFE 168 

of the self, without which our self is incomplete. This 
not-self always is, nay must be, different from the self 
which is aware of it, yet this difference, which is necessary 
to knowledge, or even to consciousness, is felt also at the 
same time as the obstacle to full comprehension in so far 
as we cannot enter into the inmost nature of things unlike 
ourselves : while, if the things of which we are conscious 
are persons like the person that knows them, the * know- 
ledge of acquaintance ' is possible, and we are able by 
sympathy and love to achieve a closer union, yet this 
too has its limitations, and there remains a bar which all 
the love and insight in the world cannot do away with. 
On the other hand that consciousness of ourselves which 
we have in introspection, self-examination, and so forth, 
seems to involve even at its best something of make- 
believe, wherein we treat as two that which is one and 
single. 

Now in the doctrine of the Trinity we have the divine 
self-consciousness represented as freed from these limita- 
tions which we find in our own. God's not-self or other 
is described as being wholly what he himself is and knows 
himself to be ; yet in this inner converse of God with God, 
the self and the other have each the satisfactory complete- 
ness of a distinct person ; while, on the other hand, these 
two persons are each in the other in a mutual inwardness 
whereof the utmost human love and sympathy can but 
afford a faint image. Moreover the unity which makes 
possible the mutual intercourse of the two and is actua- 
lized in that intercourse is regarded as being not (as in 
us, when we contrast ourselves as subject with any object) 
something to be described by some such abstract name as 
* unity,' * absolute/ or the like ; nor (as when we are think- 
ing of our relations with other persons) as a love which 



164 DIVINE PERSONALITY 

we feel, an attribute which belongs to us, a relation in 
which we are— no, nor even as something individual and 
personal, yet not fully individual or personal, like a 
community, a commonwealth, or a church, in which we 
Hve at one with our fellows ; but as something which, 
' proceeding from both ' those who are mutually subjects 
and objects of the eternal process, possesses itself the 
complete reality of Personal Spirit. 

The doctrine thus outlined may be justly considered 
as suggestive of a way in which not only may the nature 
of the object of our rehgious consciousness be conceived 
so as to afford satisfaction to the demand for a fully per- 
sonal object of that consciousness, but also the social 
medium, through which the rehgious (and indeed the whole 
spiritual) hfe is imparted to the individual human soul, 
may be exhibited as reflecting an intrinsic sociality in 
the ultimate sources of that life. 

I may perhaps be allowed to dwell for a little while on 
some particular features of this representation of the 
Divine Nature in virtue of which it meets certain char- 
acteristic requirements of the rehgious consciousness 
with which it might at first seem difficult to reconcile 
the admission of the essentially social character of Per- 
sonality. 

In the first place we may observe that it safeguards 
the unity of God, which might appear to be imperilled 
if the acknowledgment of Personality in God be found to 
involve the recognition of the Divine Nature as in itself 
social. The impulse to seek for an ultimate unity in the 
manifold variety of our experience is the very mainspring 
of our endeavour to understand the world about us, and 
on this account no m^ere polytheism will ever be found 
adequate to the requirements of the religious conscious- 



THE POLITICAL LIFE 165 

ness ; for it is indeed in connexion with the religious con- 
sciousness, as I have elsewhere attempted to show,^^ that 
the first expHcit efforts are made to frame, in obedience to 
that impulse, a conception of the whole. Even short of 
a strict dualism, Kke that which is expressed in the Mani- 
chean doctrine of a Good and an Evil Principle, the diverg- 
ent and opposed characters attributed to the members 
of such a divine society as the Olympian pantheon render 
any such celestial court, despite the monarchy of Zeus 
or of the corresponding deity in other similar systems, 
an unacceptable representation of that supreme Object, 
in the quest whereof the human heart m.ust disquiet itself 
until it can find rest in union there with. ^3 

On the other hand, this account of the Divine Nature, 
while emphasizing both its PersonaHty and its Unity, 
yet does not endanger that very Unity itself by making 
it dependent for the social intercourse, in virtue whereof 
alone it can be described as ' personal,' upon beings which 
stand to it as its creatures. Where this is done the 
Divine Being is not self-sufficient, and the Unity of the 
Godhead is not that which is, as I have contended, re- 
quired by the religious consciousness, namely that ultimate 
Unity which may be called the Unity of the Absolute, 
but only the unity which belongs to one member of a 
society of persons. 

I do not overlook the possibility of arguing that the 
Trinitarian theology, for which these merits may be claimed, 
fails after all to do what it promises, in that, by leaving 
outside of the Divine Essence a world of created spirits, 
it has still on its hands the very same problems of unity 

-^' Group Theories, pp. i88. 

23 Aug. Conf. i. I, Fecisti nos ad te, et inquietum est cor nostrum 
donee requiescat in te. 



166 DIVINE PERSONALITY 

and diversity, in respect of the relations existing between 
God and these created spirits, which it has made a show 
of solving by its theory of the mutual relations of the 
Persons included within the Divine Essence. ^4 I have 
already, however, in the Lecture of my previous course 
which dealt with the Problem of Sin, suggested that, 
since it is precisely in the instance of personal character 
that we come nearest to understanding how perfection may 
co-exist with the desire of self -communication, we may, 
if we take seriously the doctrine of Divine Personality, 
see in the direction indicated by that doctrine, the hope 
of a settlement of this particular difficulty. I thus do 
not regard the transcendence of the Deity as incom- 
patible with his having that perfection which is required 
in the Object of religious worship, provided that transcen- 
dence is conceived in the form which on many grounds 
appeared to be the most adequate to satisfy those demands 
of the religious consciousness which the doctrine of tran- 
scendence is designed to meet, in the form, that is to say, 
of Personality. 

The discussion which has occupied us in this Lecture 
hitherto of the notion of corporate PersonaHty and of its 
relation to that of Divine Personality, has been relevant 
to our subject because it might be suggested that a concep- 
tion having its origin in the social or political activity 
of the human spirit would be found to throw a new Hght 
upon the significance of the tendency to ascribe Per- 
sonality to God ; a light in which that tendency would 
be seen to have been misinterpreted by us when we 
saw in it evidence that in Religion the worshipper does 
actually enjoy what may be properly called a personal 
intercourse with the Object of his worship. 

-4 See Journal of Theological Studies, ii. 5 (Oct. 1900), pp. 54, 55. 



THE POLITICAL LIFE 167 

But it remains to consider in respect of the social or 
political activity of the human spirit, as we have pre- 
viously considered in respect of its scientific, artistic and 
moral activities, how far the attribution of Personahty 
to God harmonizes with the frame of mind produced 
by the activity-question. And here at first sight it might 
seem as if there were good reason for holding that, at any 
rate when the development of political life has reached a 
certain stage, the theology which represents God as per- 
sonal is uncongenial to the type of character correspondent 
to that stage. 

Those who recollect the view put forward in the preced- 
ing Lecture of the theocratic implication of the notion of 
obligation alike in individual and in social life will have 
no difficulty in divining the nature of the reasoning which 
I have in my mind in saying this. The progress of the 
social or political consciousness from that of the slave- 
master and his slave to that of the free citizen reveals, 
it may plausibly be said, a constant tendency to the 
elimination from that consciousness of the sense of personal 
inferiority or dependence, and with the final disappear- 
ance of it m.ust disappear all the comprehension of that 
worshipping attitude in Religion which reflected in other 
days the subject's abasement of himself before his chief 
or sovereign. The old fashion of worship cannot be 
that of the free man. The traditional phrases and 
observances of religion are apt to foster a temper 
inconsistent with and distasteful to that spirit of proud 
independence which recognizes no superior on earth ; 
and this spirit cannot be at home with Religion until 
they are discarded. 

The frame of mind which gives rise to this criticism' 
is one which has found frequent expression in the literature 



168 DIVINE PERSONALITY 

of the nineteenth century. To confine ourselves to that 
of England, the poetry of Swinburne is full of it : 

Glory to Man in the highest, for Man is the master of things, ^s 

and probably the strain in the thought of William Blake, 
referred to in a previous Lecture of this course, which 
finds expression in such a phrase as : 

Thou art a Man : God is no more ; 
Thine own Humanity learn to adore, ^^ 

had not a little to do with the attraction exercised by 
the older poet upon one who may almost be called his 
re-discoverer. 

But, whatever glamour may be thrown by genius and 
enthusiasm about the crowning * declaration of inde- 
pendence ' which is not content with casting off allegiance 
to every earthly authority but refuses subjection even 
to God, it is assuredly a vain hope to think that by deny- 
ing Personality to God we exalt the dignity of Personality 
in man. On the contrary, in the last resort the affirma- 
tion of Personality in God establishes as nothing else can 
do in a position of unassailable eminence the image of 
Divine Personality in man. Without that affirmation the 
confident assertion of man's greatness is apt to echo among 
the desolate spaces of a universe wherein this evanescent 
Personality seems to count for nothing, like the voice of 
a child shouting to keep his courage up among mountain 
solitudes by night. Personality may still be the highest 
thing we know, as the lost child is a thing more fearfully 
and wonderfully made than the mighty peaks or the 



*5 Swinburne, Hymn of Man. 
26 Blake, The Everlasting Gospel. 



THE POLITICAL LIFE 169 

barren moors or even the ancient heavens and their stars. 
But how will it be made easier for us to hold fast to our 
faith in the dignity of the human person, and in the 
strength of it to 

* write * the style of Gods 
And ' make ' a push at chance and circumstance, 7 

if we are convinced that there are no gods and that * chance 
and circumstance/ as they presided over the origin of 
ourselves and of our race, shall also preside over its end 
and that of each of us to boot ? I for my part cannot see. 
But in a world at the heart of which is a personal spiritual 
Life, whereof our own is in its essence a reflection, and into 
the fellowship of which we may be consciously brought 
in Religion, — in such a world speech of the dignity of 
Personality is at once seen to be no fantastic brag, flung 
in the face of an impenetrable mystery, but a solid truth 
capable of becoming the principle of a social order, rational, 
enduring, and progressive, Man, when sincere, knows him- 
self to be little as well as great ; and only if, where he is 
little, he is so in comparison with One who possesses (though 
not within human measures) that by reason of possessing 
which man is at the same time great, do his littleness and 
his greatness appear not as contradicting one another but 
as alike natural consequences of his place in God's world. 
Nor will anyone who is aware what belief in a God, as a 
Being with whom personal relations are possible, can be 
or has been in the past doubt its power to inspire a spirit of 
independence and a love of freedom at least as lofty as 
the highest that there is any reason to suppose Atheism 
competent to produce. 

The human instinct for Reverence (if we may call it 
'1 Shakespeare, Much Ado about Nothing, v. i, 37, 38. 



170 DIVINE PERSONALITY 

an instinct, remembering all the while that it is an instinct 
which presupposes the existence of Reason in the soul), 
when a speculative Atheism, which finds it essential to the 
dignity of human Personality to deny the reality of its 
Divine Archetype, has diverted it from what I should 
contend was its proper Object, will seek a substitute for 
that Object in a great man. 

This fact may be illustrated from some sayings of Blake 
quoted in the third Lecture of this course, from the calen- 
dar of festivals prescribed by Comte for the Church which 
was to profess the Religion of Humanity, and also from 
the work of the poet Swinburne, to which I have referred 
just now as exemplifying the glorification of man when 
regarded as free from allegiance to God. 

This hero-worship, while it sufficiently testifies to a 
human need of personal objects for reverence, cannot 
however be admitted without implicitly abandoning the 
humanitarian case (if I may so describe it for the moment) , 
against the recognition of Divine Personality. For the hero- 
worshipper must allow recognition of a personal superiority 
in the hero resting not upon any representative character 
wherewith the hero has been invested by popular election 
or delegation. A representative character of a kind may 
indeed be ascribed to the hero ; but only such as an 
hereditary king or aristocracy might claim in the political 
sphere. For in such cases there may be, and often is, 
a general acquiescence in their discharge of representative 
functions analogous to the general recognition of the 
hero in whatever guise — prophet or poet or patriot— as 
the spokesman of his people and his race. And if the 
human dignity of the hero-worshipper is not diminished 
by his hero-worship, what ground can there be for consider- 
ing it to be inconsistent with a full consciousness of that 



THE POLITICAL LIFE 171 

dignity to acknowledge the claim on our reverence of 
supreme Personality in God ? If we feel ourselves not de- 
pressed but uplifted by the knowledge that our heroes may 
call us brethren, why should a contrary effect be expected 
from the conviction that we are the children of God ? 
It may perhaps be said that the attitude which Religion 
requires us to adopt towards God is one not merely of 
reverence but of abasement ; that a claim to lordship 
is other than one to admiration, however intense and 
fervent. But this objection can, I think, be easily met. 
We may be jealous of our personal dignity even in respect 
to our heroes, in so far as we know that, great as may 
be our debt to them for an enhancement of our person- 
ality, this personality is not itself wholly dependent 
upon them. In respect of that part thereof which is 
ours and not in any sense theirs, we owe it to ourselves 
to add to our recognition of our inferiority to them a 
recognition of their equality with us. But, in regard to 
the Supreme Personality whence ours is wholly drawn, 
we do not in any sense disparage the dignity of ours by 
acknowledging not only the superiority but the supremacy 
of the Father of spirits. ^8 And indeed, as I attempted to 
show in the last Lecture, only by recognition of this 
supremacy is the existence in the community of authority 
and of obligation to obedience thereunto explicable 
without danger to the independence and freedom of the 
private citizen. 

'8 It was wittily replied to some one who accused of Atheism 
a man noted for his pride of intellect : ' No, he reluctantly admits 
the existence of a Superior Being.' 



LECTURE VII 

DIVINE PERSONALITY AND THE RELIGIOUS 

LIFE 

In the present Lecture we are to consider the bearing of 
a recognition of Personality in God upon the religious 
activity of the human spirit. 

There are probably some to whom the thought of Religion 
apart from the acknowledgment of a personal object of 
worship is so unfamiliar that such an inquiry would seem 
to them to be unnecessary. They would echo an epi- 
grammatic criticism on Comte's ' Religion of Humanity ' : 
Une religion sans Dieu I Mon Dieu, quelle religion ! But 
history shows that a great Religion may exist and flourish 
in which worship is, at any rate, not envisaged as essen- 
tially a relation of personal communion with a living 
Spirit. And it is even possible, with the philosopher 
Schopenhauer, to regard the notion of a ' personal God ' 
as actually inconsistent with a truly religious frame of 
mind. For him the condemnation of life as evil and 
illusory was of the very essence of Religion ; to revert 
for a moment to the phraseology of the second Lecture of 
this course, he admitted only a negative relation of the 
religious to the economic activity of the human spirit. 

The survival in Christianity from Judaism of belief in 
a Divine Ruler, a * Moral Governor of the universe,' 
dealing out rewards to virtue and punishments to vice, 

172 



I 



THE RELIGIOUS LIFE 173 

with the optimistic outlook which seemed to follow from 
it/ he considered prejudicial to that claim on the part of 
the younger faith to be regarded as in the proper sense a 
true Religion which might otherwise have been grounded 
upon its character as, like Buddhism and the mysticism 
of the Upanishads, a doctrine of self -renunciation. ^ 

Holding, as we have seen reason to hold, that there is 
a positive as well as a negative relation of our religious 
activity to our economic, we shall not in any case be able 
to accept this view of the great pessimist as it stands. 
We may indeed be ready to admit that the kind of theology 
which is exclusively preoccupied with the thought of a 
Moral Governor of the universe, the kind of theology 
against which, as we saw in a previous Lecture, Blake 
launched his passionate invective, is apt, by its indiffer- 
ence to Mysticism, which, when found in connexion with 
any creed whatsoever, always attracted the sympathy 
of Schopenhauer, to reveal a certain inability to compre- 
hend much of what is deepest and most intense in religious 
experience. But, so far as this is so, this same kind of 
theology must also tend, even while describing God in 
terms of Personahty, to deny to his worshippers the pos- 
sibility of intimate personal communion with him. This 
is especially true, as we have several times had occasion 
to point out, of the theology of Kant, which Schopenhauer 
may be supposed to have had particularly in his mind. 
To deny, however, to the worshipper the possibiHty of 
genuinely personal intercourse with the Object of his 
worship is, according to the view put forward in these 
Lectures, to deny the Personality of God in any sense in 

1 For the view of this behef and of optimism as characteristic of 
Judaism, cp. Montefiore, Liberal Judaism and Hellenism, pp. 15 foil. 

2 Schopenhauer, Die Welt ah Wille und Vorstellung, § 70, 



174 DIVINE PERSONALITY 

which the affirmation of it has a truly religious signi- 
ficance. 

We have seen that the representation of God as one 
with whom such intercourse is possible can be harmonized 
with the experience proper to the economic, scientific, 
artistic, ethical and social activities of our spirit ; but it 
is in religious experience that we must seek the true ground 
of this representation. 

A distinguished philosopher and theologian of our own 
day, Dr. Rashdall, the present Dean of Carlisle, has lately 
criticized the claim, which he conceives to be implied in 
such language as I have not shrunk from using in these 
Lectures about an experience of personal intercourse 
in Rehgion, to an immediate as distinct from an 
inferred knowledge of God. This criticism is closely 
connected in the same thinker's mind with the insistence, 
which is characteristic of him, upon the view that the 
conviction which each of us has of the existence of other 
persons besides himself is based upon an argument from 
analogy. I think that a discussion of Dr. Rashdall's 
position will be found to be a convenient way of deaUng 
with the claims of religious experience which the exper- 
lent takes for an experience of personal intercourse with 
the Supreme Reahty to be considered as evidence of 
Divine Personality. 

What Dr. Rashdall disputes is that there is an ' immedi- 
ate,' ' intuitive' or * a ;^non" knowledge of God's existence.3 
He points out that the " vast majority " of men, " inclu- 
ding the most religious of them," are conscious of no 
such knowledge. " Missionaries do not find that they can 
assume a knowledge of God in their hearers ; they have 
to prove it by arguments." " Individuals among ourselves, 
3 Modern Churchman, viii. pp. 305 ff. (Aug. 191 8). 



THE RELIGIOUS LIFE 175 

who are brought up without reHgious education, do not 

commonly possess " any belief in God. '* I read fathers, 

schoolmen, modern theologians, without coming across 

a single trace of such immediate knowledge." " The 

great masters of philosophical thought, including the most 

theistic, never suggest such a notion. It is equally absent 

I from the thought of what I may call the professional 

j metaphysicians, and from that of men of essentially 

religious genius." He instances Martineau and Newman 

as inferring the existence of God from the experience of 

causality or from the consciousness of moral obligation. 

" A beUef for which a reason, a ' because ' can be given is 

1 not immediate." The claim to an immediate know- 

; ledge of God is almost confined to a few mystics ; among 

' whom " the great religious leaders of mankind " cannot, 

in Dr. Rashdall's opinion, be numbered, any more than 

I the " vast mass of believers in any religion, or at all 

events, in any definitely theistic religion." 

But further : " I do not know," says Dr. Rashdall, 
I " of any sort of immediate knowledge or anything which 
I can be at all plausibly called immediate knowledge, which 
j bears the least resemblance to this alleged immediate 
knowledge of another spiritual being. It may be doubted 
whether even my knowledge of myself can properly be 
called immediate, in the strict sense of the word, since it 
lis only by reflecting on what is implied in many succes- 
sive states of mind that I construct the notion of a contin- 
uous self. I will not say that my knowledge of myself 
is an inference ; it may better be described as an ' intel- 
' lectual construction.' But certainly my knowledge of 
other people's existence is a matter of inference. No 
philosopher has ever doubted this, so far as I know, till 
quite recently." 



176 DR^INE PERSONALITY 



i 



Now there is so much in all this that appears to me both 
true and important, while at the same time the intention 
of the writer would seem to extend to the denial that such 
an experience of personal intercourse with God is possible 
as I have in these Lectures contended gives its religious 
significance to the doctrine of Divine Personality (a 
doctrine strongly maintained, it is to be remembered, 
by Dr. Rashdall himself), that I think it worth while to 
state in some detail how far I should agree with and how 
I should differ from the view, so emphatically asserted 
in the words which I have quoted, that our knowledge 
of the existence of spiritual beings, whether of ourselves, 
of our fellow men, or of God, is never ' immediate,' but 
always the result either of ' inference ' or of * intellectual 
construction.' 

It will be, however, convenient to prefix to this state- 
ment some observations on the words used by Dr. Rash- 
dall to describe the kind of knowledge of God, the existence 
of which he disputes ; for, as Bacon long ago warned us,4 
among the prejudices which lead the mind astray in the 
pursuit of truth, and against which we must ever be 
upon our guard, there is a numerous class which owes 
its existence to an over-carelessness in scrutinizing and 
testing the current coin of the intellectual market-place, i 

The words which Dr. Rashdall employs to describe 
this pretended knowledge of God are these : ' immediate,' 
* intuitive,' ' a priori/ He seems to consider these three 
adjectives as more or less synonymous, and to take for 
granted that knowledge reached by way of ' inference ' 
can be qualified by none of them. 

And first as regards the word * immediate.' It is not 
by any means obvious that there can be no * immediacy ' 
4 Nov. Org. i. 43. 



THE RELIGIOUS LIFE ITT 

where there is 'inference.' Indeed, as a matter of fact, 
the common logic books have something to tell us of 
' immediate inference/ But even in what is called ' medi- 
ate inference/ in syllogism, for example, there must at 
every stage be an immediate perception of the sequence 
of the conclusion upon the premisses, and without this 
all progress in that kind of reasoning would be impossible. 
On the other hand, the validity of those ' self-evident ' 
laws of thought on which, according to Dr. Rashdall 
himself, all inference rests, and our knowledge of which 
he would probably allow to be * immediate,' must ulti- 
mately be perceived in particular instances ; and, though 
they are used universally from the first, their explicit 
statement in universal form as principles or axioms is 
the result of later reflexion. ' Immediacy ' in a 
quite legitimate sense can thus perfectly well coexist 
with the ' mediation ' which is characteristic of all 
' inference ' ; it is indeed itself, as we saw, a feature 
of every inference ; and thus there can be no good 
reason for confining the word ' immediate ' to ex- 
periences (if such there be) of which no analysis or 
rational account can be given. 

Still less can the word ' intuitive ' be rightly appro- 
priated to what is irrational. Yet Dr. Rashdall seems 
so to appropriate it when he connects with his denial 
that there is any intuitive knowledge of God an emphatic 
reminder that the faith by which in theological language 
we are said to apprehend him is contrasted by St. Paul 
not with reason but with sight ; as though to call it ' in- 
tuitive ' were necessarily to contrast it with Reason. 
Nor is it to be denied that we do find * intuition ' used not 
so very uncommonly in a loose and general way for a 
belief which possesses our minds, but for which we can give 

12 



178 DIVINE PERSONALITY 

no reason except that we are, as Descartes put it, impelled 
by nature to hold it, no less than for an apprehension of 
what is, in the same philosopher's phraseology, evident 
by the light of nature. s Yet the metaphor involved in the 
word * intuition ' unquestionably fits that word for 
expressing the latter of these, and unfits it for expressing 
the former. 

For intuition is properly a kind of apprehension by the 
Reason comparable to clear and keen sight among the 
bodily senses. Only when we can speak of seeing into 
the necessity of that which we apprehend can we rightly 
claim an intuition of it. In such cases we do not ask 
* why,' because the question does not arise ; because noth- 
ing could make us more certain than we already are of 
that which we apprehend ; not because we despair of 
obtaining an answer to our question, which yet, if it were 
accessible, might clear up what is now obscure to us. 
Holding, as Dr. Rashdall does, that the existence of God 
is not self-evident, he must also hold it not to be 
intuitive ; but if it were self-evident, though it would 
in that case be ' intuitive,' it would nevertheless not fall 
outside of the sphere of Reason, except in that narrow^ 
and practically obsolete sense in which only * discursive ' 
reason, with its indirect approach to its object through 
an intermediate term, is held to be entitled to that name. 
Nor indeed can * intuition ' any more than * immediacy ' 
be regarded as excluded from the sphere of discursive 
reason itself. It is unfortunate that some of Aristotle's 
language concerning the * intuitive understanding ' which 
he calls vovq, language which has passed into the tradi- 
tional phraseology of Logic, suggests that the task of 
this faculty is over and done with when we pass from the 
$ See Descartes, Med. iii. 



THE RELIGIOUS LIFE 179 

first principles of reasoning to the truths which by the 
help of these principles we may go on to discover. For 
the whole process of discovery is only rendered possible 
by the constant exercise at every stage of the power of 
immediately apprehending the necessity, not merely of 
the ultimate premisses with which we start or which we 
find by analysis to be implied in our conclusions, but also 
of the passage from these to the conclusions which they 
necessitate. 

The last term employed by Dr. Rashdall to describe 
the kind of knowledge of which he supposes those whom 
he is criticizing wrongly to affirm God to be the object 
is ' a priori.' But surely it seems very strange to speak as 
though what is a priori cannot be ' inferred.' Origin- 
ally indeed ' a priori ' designated a particular sort of 
inference, namely that which passed from cause to effect, 
instead of from effect to cause ; but no doubt the expres- 
sion has come nowadays, in accordance with its employ- 
ment in the philosophy of Kant, to be used in a somewhat 
different connexion. Here too, however, a priori is cer- 
tainly not opposed to reason or to inference ; it is opposed 
to what is empirical ; and it is scarcely accurate to re- 
present those whom Dr. Rashdall has in view as claiming 
to possess an a priori knowledge of God ; for what they 
claim is rather a knowledge of God by experience, analogous 
to, though not of course identical with, that which we 
have of objects in time and space by the bodily senses. 
j The knowledge of God which Anselm and Descartes held 
I that they had reached by means of the argument generally 
j called ' ontological ' might no doubt be called without 
impropriety an ' a priori ' knowledge ; but this is certainly 
' knowledge reached by the exercise of the Reason, although 
the reasoning employed may (like many legitimate in- 



180 DIVINE PERSONALITY 



tellectual processes) not be satisfactorily reducible to 
syllogistic form. 

Up to this point I have, it will be observed, said nothing 
as to my own view of the nature of the knowledge of God 
due to religious experience in the form of personal inter- j 
course. I have only suggested that in expressing ourselves \ 
upon this subject it is important to be very careful — more > 
careful perhaps than Dr. Rashdall has always been — ^in 
the use of our terms, since words such as these just dis- 
cussed it is impossible to strip of the associations due to 
their original application and traditional employment. 

Turning from these considerations of language to the 
substantial question at issue, it will be convenient to 
consider first very briefly the nature of the knowledge 
which each of us has of other persons beside himself. 
It is true that there is a sense in which the worshipper's 
consciousness of the Presence of God (which, as we have 
already seen, we are compelled in the interests of the reli- 
gious life to regard as, in relation to our own souls, both 
' immanent ' and ' transcendent ') is the consciousness 
of a Presence more intimate than that of another human 
being can be : — 

Closer is he than breathmg, and nearer than hands or feet.^ 

But, in so far as it is a consciousness of the presence of 
a Spirit not only immanent in the spirit of the worshipper, 
but also distinguishable from his as that of another 
human being is distinguishable, so that we can " speak 
to him, for he hears, and Spirit with Spirit can meet," 
so far it is important for the understanding of religious 
experience to ascertain what sort of consciousness it is 
that we have one of another ; and whether it is in truth 
^ Tennyson, The Higher Pantheism, 



THE RELIGIOUS LIFE 181 

only by an ' argument from analogy ' that each of us comes 
to infer the existence of other persons beside himself. 
I will so far anticipate the conclusion of what I am to 
offer you upon this subject as to say that, while I entirely 
reject the doctrine that we infer the existence of other 
I persons by means of an argument from analogy, I do not 
at all deny either the activity of Reason, or the presence 
of what may be called ' mediation ' in the process whereby 
' we become aware of their existence. 

The theory that I infer by analogy the existence of 

I other persons beside myself appears to presuppose that 

' we start from what may be called a solipsistic position — 

; the position of one who as yet is unaware of the existence 

' of anything — or at least of any person — beside himself. 

To me nothing appears more clear than that no one starts 

I from such a position as this. It is obvious that before 

I can discuss with some one else the question whether 

or no I did start from this position I must already have 

abandoned it. We do no doubt seem sometimes to dis- 

iicuss things with other people in dreams. But we do 

not in such dreams regard our interlocutors as merely 

dream people. I am not a solipsist in my dreams, although, 

when I look back upon my dreams from the vantage- 

\ ground of waking life, I regard myself as the only person 

concerned in them ; and even then I plainly perceive my 

dream conversations to have been derived from or suggested 

by the waking experience in which I live in the society 

of other human beings. But in my dreams themselves 

I do not suppose that only I am concerned in them. 

On the contrary I think that I am deaUng with other 

independently real folk who talk to me and I to them. 

The case of dreams then does not seem sufficient to 

destroy my conviction that it is impossible to start from 



182 DIVINE PERSONALITY 

a solipsistic position. I do not believe that anyone act- 
ually does so ; and, when anyone tries to think himself 
into such a position, in order to make a new start thence, 
his solipsism, like Descartes' deliberate doubt of all which 
he had been hitherto accustomed to believe, exists merely 
as a negation, the denial of what was previously held. 
A real solipsism would, as it seems to me, exclude even 
the suggestion of the conceivableness of a reality beyond 
the self ; for how and whence could such a suggestion 
arise ? I am convinced that no one can make solipsism 
the starting-point of his thought, without the covert 
assumption that something exists beyond the self, that 
the self has an other, however decisively he may refuse to 
undertake the attempt to make distinct to his own mind 
what the nature of this other leslly is. 

Even supposing, however, that one could start as a 
solipsist, how could one possibly hope to escape from this 
initial solipsism ? We have seen that some, like Dr. 
Rashdall — who may perhaps claim Berkeley's authority 
in support of his view 7 — would maintain that it is possible 
to attain to a knowledge of other people's existence by 
means of an argument from analogy. I, it may be said, 
observe that certain of my ideas are usually attended 
by certain feelings ; when therefore there occur in my 
experience certain ideas indistinguishable from these 
v/hich are not attended by such feelings, I conjecture 
by analogy that such ideas are attended by these feelings 
after all, only they are felt not by me, but by some one 
else. 

Now no doubt we do go through a process more or less 
of this kind when we desire to ascertain whether (for 

7 See Berkeley, Principles of Human Knowledge, §§ 135 ff. Ber- 
keley does not, however, use the word ' analogy ' in this connexion . 



THE RELIGIOUS LIFE 188 

example) a figure in Madame Tussaud's celebrated exhi- 
bition is a real man or a wax-work image of one. If 
he blinks on my staring at him, starts if I touch him, 
and so forth, I conclude that it is a real man, and not a 
wax- work image. But in such cases we assume all through 
the existence of other men as a well-known fact ; the 
question is only whether this is one of such other men 
or no. On the supposed argument from analogy to the 
existence of other men, we are not supposed as yet to 
have the notion of such existence at all. But then how 
in the world could such an explanation of certain ideas 
being unaccompanied by the feelings which have actually 
gone along with them, possibly occur to us at all ? 

The man in the well-known story, who repeatedly 
pinched his neighbour's leg, thinking it was his own, 
and felt nothing, exclaimed at length, ' Yes, it has come 
at last ! ' He thought, not that some one else felt the 
pinches, but that his own leg was paralysed. Our solipsist 
is supposed to be with respect to all the phenomena of 
consciousness in the same position as the man in this 
tale was in with respect to his neighbour's leg. He thinks 
that they belong to him ; he expects from previous 
experience a certain phenomenon to be attended by a 
certain painful sensation ; he finds it unattended by it ; 
surely he would conclude, like the man in the story, that 
something had gone wrong with him, not (as no such 
possibility had e% hypothesi hitherto entered his head) 
that some one else was feehng a painful sensation such as 
he generally felt on occasion of a like phenomenon. 

In actual fact, of course no one begins to reason before 
having already the notion of other people's existence. 
Human consciousness is from the first a social conscious- 
ness, the consciousness of an objective world common to 



184 DIVINE PERSONALITY 

one's own self with other selves, through our intercourse 
with whom this consciousness is developed. We have 
no evidence to show how apart from such intercourse this 
distinctively human consciousness could be attained. 
We should, I fancy, seek in vain — ^whether among human 
children stolen in earliest infancy by wolves or elsewhere — 
for a real prototype of the * Mowgli ' of Mr. Kipling's 
delightful fiction. 

But to deny on such grounds as these that the know- 
ledge which each of us has of the existence of other persons 
beside himself can possiUy be explained as the result 
of an inference by way of analogy is not to affirm, as is 
sometimes insinuated, the possession by everyone of us 
of a mysterious knowledge of the existence of other 
persons, independent of perception through the senses 
and similar to our knowledge of those logical or 
mathematical axioms whose universal validity is said 
to be self-evident. It does not expose us to a challenge 
to say prior to experience how many such other persons 
there are. It does not imply that we refuse to assign 
to the exercise of our reasoning faculty any part in the 
attainment of this knowledge or to acknowledge the 
presence in it of any kind of mediation. 

Dr. Rashdall himself, as we have seen, hesitates to say 
that the knowledge which each of us has of his own exist- 
ence is merely an * inference,' — but neither can it, he 
thinks, be properly called ' immediate ' ; he prefers to 
describe it as an * intellectual construction.' Now certainly 
the notion of a continuous self, persisting through change 
and distinguished from, while at the same time having 
its actual being in successive states of mind, may be very 
properly called an * intellectual construction.' I should 
not myself object to anyone who so pleased calling it 



THE RELIGIOUS LIFE 185 

an * inference.' Unquestionably it needs an exercise of 
reason to attain to it, and without mediation by memory 
it would be impossible. Nevertheless there is presupposed 
in it throughout a consciousness of self which it explains 
or explicates, but which it could not create, and 
apart from which it could not itself exist. Nor at any 
point of the complex process of reflexion or ' intellectual 
construction ' which we have mentioned does this con- 
sciousness cease to be in an intelligible sense * immediate,' 
though with an ' immediacy ' quite compatible with the 
presence of ' mediation ' in that process. 

For my own part, I should be prepared to contend 
that we may observe also in our knowledge of objects 
a like co-existence of * immediacy ' with ' inference ' or 
* intellectual construction.' It may, I think, be con- 
vincingly shown ^ (though this is not the place to deal at 
length with the subject) that all attempts, such as 
have been frequently made by psychologists, to explain 
our perception of an external world as derived from a 
consciousness of mental states merely as such, must be 
in the end unsuccessful ; and that such perception is an 
irreducible element of our consciousness, and may be 
described as ' immediate,' although the elaborated notion 
of the world about us and of our own bodies in relation 
to it and within it which is characteristic of the mature 
human mind (not to speak of the further developments 
involved in the mathematical conception of Space and the 
scientific view of the world), is the result of a highly 
complicated effort of ' intellectual construction,' and 
includes much that is not only mediate and inferential 
but even analogical and hypothetical. 

* See especially H. W. B. Joseph in Mind, N.S. 75, pp. 305 ff., 
457 ii- ; 76, pp. 161 ff. (July and Oct. 1910, Apr. 1911). 



186 DIVINE PERSONALITY 

In quite similar fashion do I take the recognition of an 
immediate experience of intercourse with other minds to 
be consistent with the frank admission that our developed 
notion of a social world is an ' intellectual construction/ 
full of mediation of various kinds, though presupposing 
the presence in it throughout of such an ' immediate ' 
experience, apart from which it would cease to exist. I 
do not think that there is in such a view anything strange 
or new ; indeed, it seems to me to be already implied in 
the Platonic doctrine, to which I have frequently referred, 
and which all experience appears to confirm, that we learn 
the structure of our own souls through observation of 
the social structure which confronts us and which yet 
we can only understand by recognizing in it the expression 
on a larger scale of sentiments, desires, or impulses in- 
herent in the nature of each one of us. 

I hope that this long digression from our main topic 
will not be thought irrelevant and superfluous. I think 
it may prove to be of considerable assistance in clearing 
the way for a better understanding of what is meant 
by speaking of a religious experience of personal inter- 
course between the worshipper and his God. 

For it will, I think, have become plain that it is pos- 
sible to speak of having a direct or immediate knowledge 
of another person without intending thereby to lay claim 
to the possession of some mysterious or magical power, 
of which the great majority of our fellow men have no 
experience, and which is independent of the ordinary 
means of communication through sensible signs. No 
doubt it would be idle to deny that in passing from the 
mutual intercourse of human beings to the intercourse 
of human beings with God we have passed into a sphere 
less obviously familiar to all. Were it otherwise indeed 



THE RELIGIOUS LIFE 187 

there would be no significance in the time-honoured 
contrast, to which, as we saw, Dr. Rashdall has directed 
our attention, of ' faith ' with ' sight.' But we may at 
least be prepared by our examination of the nature of 
our acquaintance with persons like ourselves to admit 
that, if Religion be other than an illusion altogether, 
there may be an immediate knowledge of God enjoyed 
by ordinary reHgious people who would ascribe their 
conviction of his existence and their conception of their 
own relation to him to the arguments or persuasions of 
teachers and preachers, and would altogether disavow 
for themselves any acquaintance with such extraordinary 
experiences as are found in the biographies of those to 
whom the name of ' mystic ' is commonly appUed. 

I conceive Descartes to have been right in his view 9 
that in the consciousness of our own incompleteness or 
imperfection is implicit a consciousness of that with which 
we are thereby contrasted ; or, in other words, a con- 
sciousness of God. This consciousness may, if we like, 
be called ' a priori,' since it is not derived from any parti- 
cular experience but is involved in the character of any 
human experience whatsoever. 

In the same way the perception of Space may be called 
' a priori ' if, as I hold, it is vain to attempt its derivation 
from any more primitive perception in which it is not 
alread}^ involved. But our conviction of the infinity of 
Space is also a priori in the sense that it is obviously 
not obtained by an induction of particular experiences, 
but by reflection on the nature of such experiences as 
involve a perception of externality. It is none the less 
a priori because such reflection requires the exercise of 
a power of abstraction which can hardly be supposed to 
9 See Descartes, Med. iii. 



188 DIVINE PERSONALITY 

belong to all human minds, and because, even among the 
most civilized peoples, only comparatively few individuals 
ever attend to this implication of their own everyday 
thoughts and actions. But, unless we were from the first 
and still continued to be aware of the Space which we 
afterwards discover on reflexion cannot be finite, this 
reflection itself would be impossible ; and in making it 
we inevitably — since it is precisely that very Space 
wherein our bodies are and no other which we have inferred 
to be infinite — come at last to regard ourselves as aware 
of infinite Space ; for, though we certainly do not perceive 
at any time more than a finite region of space, we find 
ourselves unable to think of this same finite region which 
we perceive otherwise than as a portion of infinite Space. 
In like manner my agreement with Descartes that what 
may be called an implicit consciousness of God is bound 
up with our self-consciousness from the first in no wise 
tempts me to deny the necessity of thought and inference 
to the attainment of such an articulation and expHcation 
of this familiar consciousness as could deserve the name 
of a knowledge of God ; any more than the recognition 
that a certain consciousness of self is presupposed in all 
rational activity, or the conviction that it is impossible 
to deduce from anything which does not already imply 
it our perception of external objects, compels us to main- 
tain that Psychology and Natural Science, or even that 
unsystematic familiarity with the ways of persons and 
things that we expect from sensible and experienced men 
of the world, come by nature. Certainly they no more 
do so than, despite the opinion expressed by Shakespeare's 
learned constable, do reading and writing.^o After all, 
to regard it as characteristic even of Mysticism, as seen 
10 Shakespeare, Much Ado about Nothing, iii. iii. 



i 



THE RELIGIOUS LIFE 189 

in its greatest representatives, to rely upon some immed- 
iate impression, which would render all thought and 
inference superfluous for the aspirant after divine know- 
ledge, would be to make a grave mistake. 

Yet when a man, whether he be what is called a ' mystic ' 
or no, has once attained to a genuine religious faith, and 
convinced himself that he stands in the Presence of God, 
he is sure that he has stood there from the first ; and that 
in the whole process of his conviction, although it may 
have included a stage at which he would have described 
himself as entertaining the possibility of God's existence 
as a mere hypothesis to account for certain experienced 
facts, God has in truth been revealing himself to him. 
He will be unable to conceive even his initial seeking of God 
as other than a response to an action of God upon his 
soul," which was none the less immediate in one sense 
because in another it availed itself of means ; just as we 
should not hesitate to speak of the direct or immediate 
influence of a teacher in stimulating the interest of a 
pupil, although no doubt this stimulation is mediated 
by voice and glance and touch, by sympathy with the 
pupil and study of his tastes. 

So far I have only been concerned to contend that we 
may, without unfaithfulness to fact or disparagement of 
the part played by reason in the discovery of God, speak 
of a direct or immediate experience of the Divine Being. 

While it has perhaps seldom if ever been found possible 
to avoid altogether in the language of Religion the de- 
scription of our relation to the Divine Being in terms of a 
personal intercourse, it is not, as we have seen, true to 
say that in all systems this description is seriously taken. 

" Cp. Pascal, Pensees (ed. Faugere, ii. 231), Tic ne me chercherais 
pas si tu ne m'avais trouve. 



190 DIVINE PERSONALITY 

And it has not been my intention to limit the appUcation 
of the remarks which I have just made to systems in 
which it is so taken. But since, even where PersonaHty 
is not ascribed to God in the theological account given 
of the religious experience, this experience is conceived, 
in proportion to its degree of perfection, to engage the 
whole or at least the heart of the worshipper's personality, 
it may, I think, be truly said that Religion is always the 
experience of a direct personal relation to the Highest. 

This last sentence may perhaps require some commen- 
tary, which may be most conveniently given in a brief 
reference to one or two forms of Religion in which this 
character of personal intercourse may seem especially 
to be lacking. 

There is no doubt a widespread type of Religion in which 
the worshipper regards his religious life rather as a matter 
of social observance or of identification of himself with 
his people than as an individual concern of his own. Yet 
here we find him usually recognizing that there are members 
of the community who are religiously his superiors just 
because their relation to the Divine has an intimate and 
immediate character lacking to his own. 

On the other hand there are cases in which, although 
little account is made of Personality as a character of 
the Divine, yet the religion is very much an individual 
religion, finding its perfection in solitary asceticism 
and meditation, and the Object of religious veneration 
tends to be the ' dweller in the innermost,' the devotee's 
own ultimate Selfhood, reached by the abnegation of 
whatever seems transient and separable in the constitu- 
tion of his personality. 

Finally, in those types of philosophical Religion which 
expressly deny the reciprocation of the worshipper's re- 



THE RELIGIOUS LIFE 191 

gard by the Object of his reverence, and thereby the truth 
of the representation of rehgion as personal intercourse, 
it is nevertheless just in the fullest development of a man's 
personality that he is supposed to attain to the contem- 
plation of the Supreme excellence. Thus for Aristotle 
the vovg in each man is each man's true self ; ^^ and 
it is precisely in the complete understanding of our own 
nature as determined by our place in the Whole of reality 
that for Spinoza the amor intellectualis Dei consists. 

Everywhere indeed our conception of Religion seems 
to include a certain ' warmth and intimacy ' ^3 which we 
associate with such experiences as we call emphatically 
personal (though of course in a sense all human experiences 
may be so designated). It is just this characteristic of 
Rehgion which the Founder of these Lectures had in 
view when he described it in his will as " a true and 
felt knowledge — not mere nominal knowledge— of the 
relations of man and of the universe to God." When 
we speak of some other form of activity than that which 
we generally designate as specifically religious. Science 
or Art or Morality or Politics or Philosophy, being this 
or that man's religion, we mean, I think, not only that his 
whole self is engaged in the pursuit of that activity, 
surrendered to it and dependent upon it, but also that 
this devotion to it is experienced with a warmth and 
intimacy the absence of which w^ould make it no longer 
a rehgion but merely a task ; as, on the other hand, the 
absence of a sense of self-surrender and dependence would 
reduce it to the standing of a hobby. '-» 

But it is in intercourse with other persons that, out- 
side of Religion, we find most readily and naturally the 

I- Ar., Eth. Nic, x. 7, 11 78 a 2. 

^3 James, Principles of Psychology, i. p. 331. Cp. above, p. 151. 

^4 Cp. God and Personality, p. 214. 



192 DIVINE PERSONALITY 

consciousness of ' warmth and intimacy * united with those 
sentiments of reverence and self-surrender which would 
appear to demand in their object a reality fully equal 
to that of their subject. Thus the mutual relation of 
persons seems to be that which bears by far the closest 
resemblance to the relation of the personal Soul to the 
Supreme Reality which we call Religion ; so that we shall 
expect attempts to assimilate it to any other form of human 
activity to be less satisfactory than that which allows the 
mutual relation of persons to suggest the language by 
which it is to be described. Especially will this be so if 
language drawn from other regions of human experience 
than that of personal intercourse be employed with a 
deliberate intention of divorcing Religion from the 
associations of the latter. 

The historical development of Religion points, unless 
I mistake, in a direction quite different from that in which 
they suppose it to point who favour a preference of im- 
personal to personal language in speaking of its Object. 
It points towards the acknowledgment that in that reli- 
gious experience which is least inadequately described 
as an experience of personal relations to the Highest is 
revealed a fundamental fact of the Divine Life, which 
thus becomes known as in its inner nature a blissful life 
of mutual knowledge and love. 

It may, however, be said:i5 Granted that there has 
been so far at any rate on any considerable scale no higher 
or deeper form of religious experience than that which 
has found its best expression in terms of a personal in- 
tercourse between the worshipper and his God ; is it not 
premature to assume that this or any other which has as 
yet made a figure on the historical stage is a fixed and 

15 I owe the suggestion of this difficult3^ to Professor Muirhead. 



THE RELIGIOUS LIFE 193 

final form, beyond which it is impossible to anticipate a 
further development ? The answer I should give to such 
a question as this will be found to introduce us to the 
problem which I propose to discuss in the next Lecture — 
that namely of the criticism by Naturalism from the one 
side, and by Absolute Idealism from the other, of the claim 
made on behalf of Personality to immunity from dis- 
solution either into movements of matter or into cate- 
gories of thought. 

It would be only a parrying of such a question as I 
have supposed put to me to say — and yet it is, I think, 
worth saying at the outset — that nothing appears to me 
more to recommend the description of the relation between 
the worshipper and the Object of his worship in terms of 
personal intercourse than the circumstance that of all 
forms of Reality with which we are conversant none 
impresses us as possessing a larger measure than Person- 
ality of freedom from predetermined external conditions 
which would limit the possibihties of novel development. 
We might speak of the infinite possibilities of a chaos ; 
we might call a lifeless machine or a living but mindless 
organism a systematic and even (in the latter case) a 
self-determined whole ; but to combine systematic order 
with a possibility of development in various directions, 
determined by a self-conscious principle of choice within 
itself, is the prerogative of Mind or Reason ; and the 
rational living being is, as we have often noted, that 
which we call a Person. Thus it is (as I observed when 
discussing the problem of sin in the former course of 
Lectures),'^ "in the instance of personal character" 
that " we seem to find no incompatibility between the 
thought of a perfection upon which we can place entire 

i6 See God and Personality, p. 211. 
13 



194 DIVINE PERSONALITY 

dependence and that of a living activity, whose course 
could by no means be settled beforehand, but would afford 
to the spectator the joy of anticipating ever new and 
unexpected manifestations of power and wisdom and 
goodness." The ' personal ' form of religious experience 
may thus fairly be said to merit less than any other the 
reproach of being ' fixed and final.' 

Yet this consideration, though not, I think, wholly 
irrelevant, does no more, we may be told, than parry 
the question with which we are dealing. May it not be 
said that, granting the form of religious experience which 
finds in it a personal intercourse between the worshipper 
and his God to be, on the whole, the most satisfactory 
yet reached, it is unnecessary to assume that the human 
spirit cannot pass beyond this, as other forms have been I 
left behind in the past ? It is admitted that, even as it 
is, it is impossible to regard man's communion with the 
Divine as precisely analogous to that with his fellow man ; 
that we must therefore supplement the statements which 
describe it in terms of the latter by others which empha- 
size God's immanence in his worshipper and the ultim.ate 
dependence of the whole process upon his activity. May 
not a further supplementation be eventually required, 
which would altogether subordinate the aspect of personal 
intercourse in some deeper and more perfect form of 
religious experience than that which is more or less ade- 
quately characterized by accounts which lay the principal 
stress upon that aspect ? 

To a criticism of this kind I would reply by calling 
attention to the following points. 

I would freely allow the need of some supplementation 
(if we may use the word) of the mutual intercourse of 
human beings in order to describe the communion of human 



THE RELIGIOUS LIFE 195 

beings with God. But I would insist that this ' supple- 
mentation ' shall not be in fact a reduction ; and that 
we do not end in so describing the latter that all which was 
gained by borrowing the language appropriate to the former 
is again lost. It can scarcely be doubted that this has 
sometimes been the ultimate result of what promised 
to be an elimination from religious experience, as merely 
temporary and subjective, of so essential a factor of 
anything at all resembling human intercourse as reci- 
procation by God of the worshipper's knowledge and 
love of him. 

I would urge very strongly that we are presented 
with such a reduction instead of a supplementation, 
unless there be attributed to the Object of worship a 
reality at least as full and concrete as is attributed to his 
worshipper. 

But I would recognize that some of those whom I should 
accuse of eviscerating rather than supplementing the 
view of religion which takes it for personal intercourse 
between God and man would insist that the accusa- 
tion involves a fundamental misconception of the nature 
of both the Absolute Reality and the individual human 
personality. To meet this criticism it will become neces- 
sary for us to investigate more closely the real rank to be 
assigned in the kingdom of Reality to the finite individual 
person. To this problem I shall attempt to address 
myself in the following Lectures, 



LECTURE VIII 

NATURALISM AND THE VALUE OF THE 
INDIVIDUAL PERSON 

The importance of Personality is depreciated, as I have 
already observed, from two very different points of view, 
which may be conveniently designated as those of Natural- 
ism and of Absolute Idealism. We might even speak of 
them as opposite points of view, were it not that we some- 
times find them combined in the position of the same 
thinker. In the present Lecture I shall deal with them 
apart from one another, beginning with what I shall 
call the Naturalistic depreciation of Personality. 

I will preface what I have to say under this head by 
recalling the confession which in the introductory Lecture 
of the present course I made of incompetence both in 
Physiology and in that border region of inquiry which is 
the subject matter of Psychophysics. This incompetence 
disqualifies me from treating with that fulness which 
the difficulty of the matter and its close connexion with 
our present subject would seem to demand the problem 
of the relation of Soul and Body. If my discussion of 
this problem should appear perfunctory, it is not from 
any lack of a due estimate of the intrinsic importance 
thereof, or from blindness to the truth that it is a deeply 
seated doubt whether, notwithstanding all that philosophers 
and theologians may say, the individual Soul is not in 

196 



NATURALISM AND THE INDIVIDUAL 197 

fact an accident or adjunct of the Body, originating 
and perishing along with it, which is really the principal 
obstacle in the way of a more general intellectual ac- 
ceptance of a religious view of the world. I must therefore 
ask my hearers to believe that I have not, in forming my 
own judgment, neglected to take such account of the 
results of biological research as was possible to me. In 
the few remarks which I shall make I shall endeavour to 
confine myself to considerations which, so far as I can see, 
are not at the mercy of further investigations yet to be 
made, or already made without my knowledge, into the 
nature and behaviour of our bodies, especially in relation 
to what we may call the psychical aspect of our being. 

In the first Lecture of my earlier course I endeavoured 
to point out the difficulty which Personality must in- 
evitably present to a philosophy which regards Natural 
Science as the type of genuine knowledge. I had there 
in view not so much a philosophy, such as is now commonly 
described under the name of Naturalism, which takes 
as its own the point of view characteristic of students 
of Natural Science ; but rather one which, like that of 
Green, set out to criticize that point of view as inade- 
quate to account for Natural Science itself. But, if we 
find even such a philosophy as this failing to do justice to 
the conception of Personality just because it devotes 
itself principally to an investigation of the presupposi- 
tions of Natural Science, still more shall w^e expect to meet 
with a like deficiency in a way of thinking which does 
not so much criticize as accept and make its own the 
identification of the ' philosophical ' with the ' scientific ' 
attitude of mind. 

It is characteristic of Science, as we have already 
noted, to deal with Universals ; the Individual, as such. 



198 DIVINE PERSONALITY 

must always escape its grasp ; for Science the Individual 
has no interest except as the instance of a Universal. 
But if the Individual, as such, eludes the grasp of Science, 
it follows that we may say the same of the Person, the 
Rational Individual. It may, however, be contended either 
that Science is not really incapable of grasping the 
Individual even in the form of the Person, since the 
peculiarities of any individual organism may be traced 
by scientific research to peculiarities in the structure or 
development of the ' germplasm ; ' or, alternatively, that, 
so far as it may be truly said to be incapable of grasping 
it, this is not because the Individual is above but rather 
because it is helow its consideration ; since, so far as one 
means by the Individual a mere this, there is nothing 
to say about it except to answer the question * this 
what ? ' by an account of the general nature whereof it 
is an instance. It is true that this second point is perhaps 
less likely to be made by a representative of the type of 
thought usually described as Naturalism than by the 
disciples of a philosophy akin to that whose depreciation 
of Personality will be discussed in the next Lecture ; 
but it is nevertheless in fact so much to the purpose of 
Naturalism that it will be appropriate to say something 
of it in connexion with that way of looking at the world. 
It is not, I think, difficult to see that the kind of explana- 
tion of the individual organism which Science sometimes 
claims to give is only at the most an explanation of the 
peculiarities of the Individual, not of its Individuality. 
For a germplasm with a precisely similar structure and 
history would on this showing develop into a precisely 
similar — but surely not into the same — individual. It 
is this essential distinction between Similarity and Iden- 
tity which defies scientific explanation, just because this 



NATURALISM AND THE INDIVIDUAL 199 

must always be an explanation in terms of characteristics 
which are or may be common to several individuals. 

It is well known that a great philosopher has put for- 
ward as a grand principle of metaphysics the ' identity 
of indiscernibles.' ^ No two real beings, so Leibnitz held, 
could be, except for difference of position in time or space, 
exactly alike. There must be some intrinsic diversity 
between them whereby a sufficiently penetrating intel- 
ligence could distinguish them one from another. Hence 
to speak of two things really indiscernible by any mind 
whatever would be to speak of one and the same thing 
under two names. I do not now propose to discuss this 
principle, which has much to commend it to anyone who, 
like Leibnitz, acknowledges in the universal order the 
effect of Divine Wisdom and Goodness. But it is certainly 
not a principle to which Naturalism can consistently appeal. 
It is by no means evident to any one who does not take 
as an axiom the Principle of Sufficient Reason in Leibnitz's 
sense of it, namely as the principle of the choice of the 
best among the possibilities, that there can be no two 
real things exactly alike. Were there such they would 
indeed be indiscernible, but they would not be 
identical. 

If they were really indiscernible, they might, however, 
although not identical, be said to be all one to Science, 
And this is precisely the view that Aristotle takes of 
real beings who are individual specimens of the same 
kind in the sublunary world. These, though as regards 
their matter they are distinct from one another, are, as 
regards their specific form, indistinguishable from one 
another, so that no universal statement relating to that 

I See Leibnitz's 4th Letter to Clarke ; and cp, Nouveaux Essais, 
ii, 27, iii. 6. 



200 DIVINE PERSONALITY 

particular sort of thing can be made concerning one 
which could not as well be made about another. Thus 
to Science, since it is always concerned only with what 
can be the subject of such universal statements, these 
individuals are mere instances of the Universal ; with 
their Individuality Science cannot deal, not because it 
is something too high for Science to reach, but because it 
is too low. 

We shall find it, however, convenient to remind ourselves 
at this point that Aristotle thought otherwise of Indivi- 
duality in what he regarded as a higher region of the 
universe than this earth in which our lot is cast.^ The 
starry heavens are in his view tenanted by individual 
beings known to us through the immortal lights that are 
fixed in the spheres whose eternal motion is caused by 
the desire kindled in them by the excellence of these 
exalted spirits, even as the motion of the whole Universe 
is caused by its instinctive yearning after the supreme 
excellence of God. These beings are not regarded as 
individuals of one species or kind ; each of them might 
rather be said to constitute a species by himself ; and, 
since he has never come into being nor will ever pass away, 
there is no need as in this lower world for a multiplication 
of individuals that are born and die and thus in their 
continual succession perpetuate the race to which they 
belong and preserve its special contribution to the wealth 
of the Whole. The science of Astronomy has thus no 
need to ignore the distinction between individuals of the 
same specific nature or kind, since none such exists in the 
ethereal world whereof it treats. 

Rem^ote though these ancient speculations may seem 
from the knowledge which we now possess of the pheno- 
- See on the nature of the star-spirits, Met. A 8, and cp. Z. 6. 



NATURALISM AND THE INDIVIDUAL 201 

mena to which they relate, there is still something to 
learn from them as to the nature of Individuality. It 
is as true now as in the days of Aristotle that, if ever 
an individual does but repeat a type without variation, 
it will be a mere instance of that type ; and it is in no 
way derogatory to Science to say that it does not concern 
itself with it except as such an instance. But it is no 
less true that, where the individual not merely happens 
to be the only one of its kind but recognizes itself or is 
recognized in its individuality as an unique feature of the 
Whole, by the absence of which that Whole would be 
impoverished, there the incapacity of Science to grasp 
it except as an instance (though it may chance to be the 
sole instance) of an Universal does constitute a bar to 
any claim, such as Naturalism makes on behalf of Science, 
to determine the limits of Reality. It is of course another 
question altogether where we can predicate Individuality 
in the lower and where in the higher sense ; whether 
indeed there is in fact any individuality which merely 
repeats a type. Leibnitz with his doctrine of the identity 
of indiscernibles denies this so far as relates to beings 
with a genuine unity of their own. So too it is another 
question whether, on the other hand, there be any objective 
significance in the notion of unique value, not for this 
or that conscious being, but, to use a phrase of Bacon's, 
in ordine ad universum.s A consistent Naturalism, 
we must note, could not admit that there is. 

When, however, it was said that Naturalism depreciates 
Personality, more was meant than that neither Natural 
Science itself nor a philosophy whose view of the world 
is determined by the necessary limitations of Natural 
Science can take account of the Individual, whether 
3 Bacon, Nov. Org. ii. § 13. 



202 DIVINE PERSONALITY 

rational or otherwise, except as an instance of some 
Universal. It was meant also that, in regarding Personality, 
such a philosophy must needs regard it from the outside 
only, as a mode of behaviour of certain natural objects, 
and therefore must inevitably see in it a sporadic and 
evanescent phenomenon, the peculiar interest whereof 
to ourselves who exhibit it cannot blind a sober observer 
to the small part played by it in the mighty cosmic drama 
which is unrolled before us by the researches of Natural 
Science. 

But, as some of the most thoughtful representatives 
of Naturalism have acknowledged, if we look at the matter 
from the other side, we find the position reversed. The 
whole ' choir of heaven and furniture of earth ' (to use 
the often-quoted phrase of Berkeley 4) are known to us 
only as objects either of our perception by means of the 
senses or of our thought, which infers from the phenomena 
perceived by our senses unperceived causes of those 
phenomena, and laws according to which these causes 
produce the effects which we perceive. Nor (it may 
confidently be affirmed) have the efforts been successful ^ 
which some have made to show that Perception and 
Thought, to which we owe the knowledge of the world 
which Natural Science investigates, are themselves 
intelligible as the product of that system of bodies in 
motion which they apprehend. Perception and Thought, 
whereby we apprehend objects, cannot be construed as 
part of the world of objects which we apprehend by means 
of them. This has been frequently pointed out, and I 
do not propose now to go over again ground so familiar 
to all students of this kind of questions. 

I am not, however, contending that the impossibility 
4 Berkeley, Principles of Human Knowledge, § 6. 



NATURALISM AND THE INDIVIDUAL 203 

of explaining the Mind which apprehends the world of 
objects as an object among others in the world which 
it apprehends carries with it the possibility of turning 
the tables upon Naturalism and explaining the world 
of objects as dependent for its very being on the Mind 
which apprehends it. On the contrary, however we may 
be led eventually to think of the relation of Mind or 
Spirit to what we contrast with it as Matter or Nature, 
it seems to me that apprehension always presupposes 
that what is apprehended is in some sense independent 
of the act in which it is apprehended, even if (as would 
be generally admitted to be the case, for example, with 
a pain, such as a toothache) it cannot actually exist 
apart from being apprehended. It is sufficient, for my 
present purpose at any rate, to insist that Mind, which 
apprehends the world of objects, cannot be construed 
as merely a part of the world of objects which it appre- 
hends. 

It is indeed for this reason (to cast our thoughts back 
for a moment to a point discussed in my last Lecture) 
that the acquaintance which one mind has with another 
is not to be classed with its apprehension of what is not 
Mind at all. If we look in our acquaintance with other 
minds for an apprehension of this sort, we shall find only 
our apprehension of the material vehicles through which 
the other minds express themselves ; and it is this fact 
which has led some (erroneously, as I think) to describe 
our acquaintance with other minds as due to an ' inference ' 
from perceived facts, based on an analogy with other 
facts already known to us, as though it were comparable 
with the framing of those hypotheses to account for per- 
ceived phenomena which we make in our investigation 
of external Nature, We know other minds than our own. 



204 DIVINE PERSONALITY 

not through apprehending them as objects, but through 
participation with them in a common activity. 

But while Natural Science cannot explain Personality 
as part of the system which it explores, it presupposes 
it in the sense that we have no experience of Natural 
Science, nor can, as I venture to think, even conceive of 
its existence otherwise than as the activity of a personal 
Mind. 

In its exclusive preoccupation with the Universal, 
Natural Science may find the Individual, rational or 
other, elude its grasp ; and being, as it is, essentially 
an apprehension of Objects, it can never come face to 
face with the Subject whose activity itself is. But the 
capacity of apprehending the general nature of objects 
even after this abstract fashion is an attribute of that 
Rationality which differentiates Persons from individual 
beings of lower rank. 

There will always be something paradoxical in the fact 
that with bodies of so small account in the vast material 
universe as those of human beings is associated an 
intelligence to which, just because it apprehends this 
universe in its immensity, this same paradox can present 
itself. We shall find it convenient to describe this paradox 
in the language of that one among the great historical 
systems of Philosophy which representatives of Naturalism 
often find more congenial to their own mood than any 
other — I mean the system of Spinoza. 

According to Spinoza there is but one real Substance, 
which he calls indifferently ' God ' and * Nature ; ' and 
of this one Substance Extension and Thought are attri- 
butes, and the only two attributes known to us. They 
never interact with one another, nor do they overlap 
one another. The nature of God or the Universe may 



NATURALISM AND THE INDIVIDUAL 205 

be expressed in terms of either. There is what may 
be called a complete parallelism between them, so that 
there can be nothing in the mind which is not the ' idea ' 
or mental counterpart of something bodily or material, 
nor anything in the material world of which there is not 
a corresponding ' idea.' 

Thus to the whole material system corresponds such 
an understanding of it as is the goal of the physicist, 
an understanding in which there is no thought of purposes 
or ' final causes ' but only of what may be called a mathe- 
matical or mechanical necessity. Such an imperfect appre- 
hension of it as anyone of us actually has — and this 
constitutes his ' soul ' — is primarily a consciousness of that 
part of the system which is called his ' body,' and of 
any other parts only so far as they are in direct or indirect 
contact with this. All in our ' souls ' that has reference 
to our ' bodies ' as things taken apart from the whole 
system of material nature (or, as Spinoza would say, 
of God under the attribute of Extension) only belongs 
to them so far as they themselves are similarly taken out 
of their context in the complete system of thought which 
he calls ' the infinite Understanding of God.' Such are 
the emotions which correspond to the effort by which a 
particular body maintains for a while its separate exist- 
ence ; and such again is the sense of acting spontaneously 
and for purposes of our own, which we experience when 
our movements are immediately due to processes within 
our bodies, the more remote causes of which lie in a 
region of the material universe which is beyond our ken. 
This latter sense is of course what is sometimes called the 
consciousness of the freedom of our wills ; but Spinoza 
does not consider that, in discovering this supposed con- 
sciousness of freedom to be due merely to the imperfec- 



206 DIVINE PERSONALITY 

tion of our knowledge, we need feel ourselves to be robbed 
of anything truly valuable. There is, he thinks, a much 
more precious kind of consciousness of Freedom, which 
comes not from ignorance, but from knowledge. For 
in proportion as a man sees in all that he is and does and 
suffers a consequence of the eternal and unchangeable 
nature of the Universe (or, as Spinoza would say, of God) , 
he is delivered from the bondage in which he must remain, 
at the mercy of vain hopes and fears, so long as he thinks 
of himself as having interests and possibilities of his own 
apart from the Whole of which he forms a part. 5 

In this representation of the nature of the Universe, 
great as is the measure of truth in it, and attractive as it 
is in its majestic symmetry and stoical aloofness from 
absorption in those private desires and ambitions which 
make up the life of ' passion's slaves,' ^ there is yet, as 
I have said, one feature which gives rise to suspicion 
of its adequacy. That my little knowledge of the world 
is related to the infinite understanding of God as my little 
body to the infinite extension of Nature may be true 
enough. But there is nothing to correspond in the 
world of bodies with the capacity which there is in our 
minds, notwithstanding all their limitations, of identify- 
ing themselves with the whole of which they are a part, 
so far at least as to recognize their own imperfection, and 
even, in the supreme experience of the amor intellectualis 
Dei, of rejoicing in the perfection which, in another 
sense, they do not themselves enjoy. We remember 
how Aristotle, whose philosophy was in so many respects 
similar in temper with Spinoza's, was constrained by 

i See my Hist, of Philosophy, pp. 158 ff. 

6 Shakespeare, Hamlet, iii. ii. 76, 77, ' Give me that man That is 
not passion's slave.' 



NATURALISM AND THE INDIVIDUAL 207 

his recognition of this very capacity in the Soul for Know- 
ledge, the claim to which necessarily involves a claim to 
the apprehension of the Absolute and Eternal, to supple- 
ment the story of its natural development as the inward 
expression of its bodily organization by the recognition 
of a factor, the vovg, of which he could only say that it 
" comes from without." 7 Not less truly does Spinoza's 
insistence on the presence of that in our minds whereby, 
as he says, " we feel and experience that we are immortal " ^ 
break in upon the parallelism which has made his teaching 
so congenial to thinkers of a naturalistic bent, though 
perhaps the incongruity is less openly confessed b}^ the 
modern than by the ancient philosopher. 

The existence of this consciousness of the Whole, which 
alone makes any kind of Science possible, forbids us to 
acquiesce in the depreciation of Personality whereof this 
consciousness is an integral factor when this depreciation 
is based on taking the world of objects which Natural 
Science investigates as the true reality, and the Mind, 
of which Natural Science is itself an activity, as a mere 
by-product or * epiphenomenon ' thereof. But there is 
left another possibility of depreciating Personality, which 
starts as it were from the other side, and sees in it no more 
than as it were an accident of Knowledge 9 notwith- 
standing that we are acquainted with knowledge only 
as a personal activity. As Naturalism could be accused 
of forgetting its own presuppositions, so it may be sug- 
gested that a view which takes Personality as the ultimate 
form or as belonging to the ultimate form of Mind forgets 

7 Ar. de Gen. An. ii. 3, 736 b 28. 

* Spinoza, Eth. v. 23. 

9 Bacon says of the mind in his speech ' In Praise of Knowledge ' 
{Life and Letters, i, p. 123) : ' The mind itself is but an accident 
to knowledge.' 



208 DIVINE PERSONALITY 

to discriminate between what in Mind is the presup- 
position of its scientific activity and what is itself con- 
ditioned by the objects of that activity. It is to the 
consideration of the depreciation of PersonaUty con- 
sequent on this latter way of thinking that we must now 
turn. 

The trend of thought to which I am about to call your 
attention is one familiar enough to historians of Philo- 
sophy. In some respects it may be said that it was more 
characteristic of ancient than of modern times. For 
there is more than a merely philological interest in the 
facts noted in my former course of Lectures respecting 
the comparatively recent date at which the words vTrocrradig 
and persona came to be employed in the philosophical 
sense associated by us to-day with the expression ' Per- 
sonality.' Although the statement that the conception 
of Personality was unknown to the classical philosophy 
of Greece is often rashly made, and without qualifications 
which would be necessary before one could justly assent 
to it, there is notwithstanding an element and even an 
important element of truth to be found in it. 

When it is asked whether Plato's God, for example, was 
in our sense a, personal God, or the Immortality of the Soul 
on which he laid such great stress was in our sense a 
personal immortality, I am far from saying that it is 
impossible to give a definite answer and to support it 
by reasons ; but I think it is plain that these were not 
questions which would have seemed to Plato himself 
so obvious and important as they would to the majority 
of thoughtful men to-day. Modern philosophers who 
do not think them important, or even regard them as 
questions which a truly philosophical inquirer would not 
put, would yet not deny them to be at any rate obvious. 



NATURALISM AND THE INDIVIDUAL 209 

In respect of Aristotle, the various proposed explanations 
of certain enigmatic expressions in his treatise On the 
Soul which were thought to deal with the relation of the 
vovc — that is, the capacity of apprehending absolute 
and eternal truth — to the individual personality of those 
who exhibit this capacity, fill an interesting chapter in 
the history of thought.^o But, whatever we take to have 
been Aristotle's own intention in these expressions, we 
may be certain that he would not have left them so 
susceptible of diverse interpretation as he did, had he 
shared the preoccupation with the problem of Divine and 
Human Personality which made it a matter of such 
moment with his medieval disciples of every school to 
ascertain the full purport of what it could be maintained 
that he had taught concerning them. 

It is not, however, my intention on this occasion to 
explore the history of that type of thought which issues 
in the view of Personality as belonging to a world 
which Philosophy can convict of being no more than 
Appearance and not to the ultimate nature of Spirit. 
I propose rather to examine it as it exists among our 
own contemporaries. 

In the fifth Lecture of my previous course, I called 
attention to the two different principles upon which 
we unify our mental life — the rational and the personal. 
I endeavoured to show how, while they differed widely 
from one another, they nevertheless seemed each of them 
indispensable to the other. On the rational principle, 
there belong together the premisses and the conclusion 
of a syllogism, though the conclusion be drawn by one 
man from premisses he could only have had from another, 
who yet himself had never drawn from them their legiti- 

^0 Cp. Studies in the History of Nat. TheoL, pp. 263 ft. 

14 



210 DIVINE PERSONALITY 

mate conclusion. On the personal principle there may 
belong together thoughts which have no rational con- 
nexion and are united only by links of association which 
would be unintelligible to any other person. Yet we 
should estimate the rank of a personality to a considerable 
extent, if not altogether, by the degree in which the 
succession of thoughts and volitions which make up the 
personal life is ordered on a rational principle, and should 
hardly allow the name of * person ' to anyone whose 
mind exhibited a complete absence of rational connexion 
between its contents. And on the other hand we certainly 
have no knowledge of rational connexion as holding 
except between thoughts and volitions which make 
part of some personal life or other. 

It is, however, to be observed that, whereas Rationality 
is plainly a constituent factor in what we call Personality, 
so that there would be no meaning in speaking of a life 
as personal which was not rational at all, the affirmation 
that Reason is a personal activity may without absurdity 
be regarded as a merely empirical statement to which 
nothing warrants us in ascribing necessary and universal 
validity. The contents of a personal mind, it may be 
said, are tested by their conformity with principles of 
Reason ; but the rational connexion — say, of the pre- 
misses and conclusion of a sound argument — is none the 
less rational though it be not present to any single personal 
consciousness. 

There have appeared in our own day among English- 
speaking philosophers two kindred though not identical 
ways of thinking which have attempted to lay a 
greater emphasis upon the personal than upon the 
rational principle of connexion among the contents of 
our minds, and we may find it helpful at this stage to 



NATURALISM AND THE INDIVIDUAL 211 

consider how far they have proved successful. We may 
call them respectively ' Pragmatism * and * Personal 
Idealism.' " 

In respect of the former I am only concerned at present 
with its insistence upon the purposiveness of all 
thought and upon the importance of ascertaining the 
purpose of the thinker before sitting in judgment upon 
any expression of thought in words. Though I do not 
think that the purposiveness of thought has been denied 
or even really overlooked by any great philosopher, yet 
perhaps it has not always been sufficiently borne in mind 
that the bald propositions which are taken out of their 
context to serve as examples in text-books of Logic can 
no more, as they stand, be considered adequate expressions 
of thought than sentences similarly detached to illustrate 
grammatical rules can be regarded as possessing literary 
value. Forgetfulness of the other point which I have 
mentioned as one emphasized by Pragmatism has led to 
graver misunderstandings ; and perhaps nowhere more 
remarkably than in the instance, especially interesting to 
us here, of the interpretation of religious formulas as 
statements of scientific fact without due attention to the 
purpose which they are intended to serve by those who 
frame and those who use them as expressions of certain 
religious experiences. But, while conceding to Prag- 
matism the truth of its doctrine of the purposiveness 
of thought and the importance of its warning to take 
into account a speaker's or writer's purpose before criti- 
cizing what he says or writes, we are compelled to charge 
its exponents with confusion between what in the purpose 
of a speaker or writer is irrelevant and what is relevant 

" See Proceedings of Congress of History of Religions, Oxford, 
1908, ii. pp. 419 ff. 



212 DIVINE PERSONALITY 

to a decision as to the truth or falsehood of his utterances. 
I have, however, already in the second Lecture of my 
present course adverted in another connexion to this 
confusion, and I will not dilate upon it now. I will only 
observe that in subordinating Reason to Personality on 
the ground that a personal purpose inspires the logical 
or scientific activity, as it does every other activity of the 
human spirit, Pragmatism omits to notice that only so far 
as this purpose is directed to the attainment of the truth 
does it continue to inspire the scientific activity to the 
end. I may stop counting when I will ; but if I go 
on counting, I can only count in one way. My change 
of purpose interrupts my activity of calculation and 
substitutes some other ; it does not affect the laws of the 
calculating activity itself. 

Personal Idealism is, I think, no more satisfactory 
than Pragmatism in its attempt to challenge for Persons 
a reality which it denies to Things. The very principle 
upon which the ' idealism ' of Personal Idealists turns 
when they maintain that we cannot take the object out 
of relation to the subject to which in Knowledge we find 
it related, this same principle it abandons when it comes 
to persons. ' Persons ' are, so it is held, independent 
of things, which have no reality except in relation to them ; 
and, since persons do not exist, like things, only in virtue 
of being perceived or known, they are essentially inde- 
pendent of other persons also. Nevertheless, it seems 
extremely difficult to deny that apart from the relations 
of persons to other persons and to things we should be 
unable to give any account of what we should call their 
personal characteristics. This doctrine thus seems to 
plead a prerogative for persons which cannot easily be 
admitted. The ultimately independent reality of persons 



NATURALISM AND THE INDIVIDUAL 213 

is taken away by the same reasoning as in the view of 
the Personal Ideahsts themselves ^^ takes away the inde- 
pendent reality of things. And in the long run the recog- 
nition of the independent reality of persons must lead 
also to that of the independent reality of things ; so that 
Personal Idealism would appear to be no more than a half- 
way refuge between a Realism which Personal Idealists 
are apt to brand as Materialism and an Idealism to which 
they would deny the name of * personal/ The Absolute 
Idealism which depreciates Personality as not belonging 
to the ultimate form of Mind or Spirit will be found to 
have the advantage in controversy with Personal Idealism 
of this type, which, in the case of things, has already 
denied that it belongs to the nature of Knowledge to 
have an object possessing reality independently of the 
act whereby it is known. 

But not only have certain notable attempts to give 
to the personal principle of unity in our experience a 
priority over the rational seemed to end in failure, but 
serious difficulties may be raised about the stability of 
the personal unity of experience when compared with 
that of the rational. For about that ultimate systematic 
unity of Reality which is presupposed not only by every 
kind of Science but by any use of Reason in the conduct 
of our life there is no question at all comparable with the 
question about the ultimate unity of the personal Self, 
which is raised by such phenomena as go by the significant 
name of * multiple personality.' 

I indicated already in the first Lecture of this present 

course that I should not be able altogether to avoid the 

consideration of these phenomena ; but also that I had 

no competence to offer more than such observations upon 

^- I have Dr. Rashdall chiefly in view. 



214 DIVINE PERSONALITY 

the published accounts of them as might occur to one 
possessing neither a direct acquaintance with particular 
instances of their occurrence nor a thorough familiarity 
with the literature to which they have given occasion. 
With this preliminary caution, I give for what they are 
worth two remarks upon this subject, with the grounds 
for making them. 

(i) The expression ' multiple personality ' is not really 
a justifiable description of the phenomena in question ; 
which are more fairly and appropriately designated by 
the phrase which forms the title of Dr. Morton Prince's 
well-known study of a celebrated case of the kind, * the 
dissociation of a personality.' At the same time it is not 
to be denied that the other description — if it is, as I think 
it is, open to objection as question-begging — is not an 
unnatural one. For we seem to have in these phenomena 
an exaggeration or intensification of that marked change of 
mood and outlook which, when occurring in a lesser degree, 
leads a man's friends to say of him that he is become 
' quite another person,' and, if we recollect the primary 
use of the word ' person ' for a part played in social 
intercourse, it is plain that two so-called ' personalities ' 
(such as ' Miss Beauchamp ' and ' Sally ' in Dr. Morton 
Prince's narrative) are distinguished by the fact that the 
social attitude and behaviour of the one were quite different 
from and even opposed to those of the other. Thus 
' Miss Beauchamp ' was depressed while ' Sally ' was 
exuberant ; ' Miss Beauchamp ' shy and retiring, * Sally ' 
bold and forward ; ' Miss Beauchamp ' observant of 
conventionalities, ' Sally ' defiant of them. 

We shall find it convenient in examining the relative 
merits of these two contrasted forms of expression (con- 
trasted, though sometimes both alike used by the same 



NATURALISM AND THE INDIVIDUAL 215 

writers in the same connexion), ' multiple personality ' 
and ' dissociation of a personality,' to distinguish what 
may be called an alternation from a coexistence of per- 
sonalities in one bodily organism. It is not intended to 
suggest that these two kinds of phenomena may not 
occur or seem to occur in the case of the same organism ; 
as a matter of fact Dr. Morton Prince's account of the 
' Beauchamp ' case provides an illustration of both. 

Where there is only what may be called an alternation 
of personalities it would be misleading to use language 
suggesting their coexistence. For, if we s^anbolize the 
different ' personalities ' — the different systems of emotion, 
interest and conduct exhibited by a certain human or- 
ganism — as A, B, C, D, and the organism which exhibits 
them as X, then when X is A there is no system or (if 
we are to call it so) ' personality ' B actually in existence 
at all ; and so no person who actually possesses that 
' personality,' though there is one who potentially possesses 
it in the same sense as Philip drunk is potentially Philip 
sober. 

But when we have an apparent compresence of two or 
more ' personalities ' in one organism we do seem, if this 
is not an illusory appearance, to have actually two persons 
existing where one was before, each of whom could claim 
to be the same person with that one. Here there would 
seem to be a genuine disruption of personal unity, in a 
sense in which an alternation of so-called ' personalities ' 
is not, since in such alternation there is only one person 
concerned at any one time, and, to use our suggested 
notation, only one person at a time, whichever it be, 
XB, XC, or XD, claims to be one and the same person with 
XA and reciprocally. 

I venture, however, to doubt whether there is really 



216 



DIVINE PERSONALITY 



any satisfactory evidence of this compresence of what we 
may describe as fragmentary personahties using the same 
organism. In the Beauchamp case ' Sally ' professed to 
have been aware of the doings of ' Miss Beauchamp ' 
at the time, and spoke of herself, as though, when ' Miss 
Beauchamp ' was using the organism common to them 
both, she was herself living a conscious life in a state 
of unwilling suppression, from which she was unable to 
escape. ' Miss Beauchamp,' on the other hand, pretended 
to no recollection of the doings of ' Sally,' of which she 
appears to have been aware only by hearsay or by inference 
from their effects, just as one might be of the doings of 
some one else who had, as we say, impersonated one in 
one's absence and incurred obligations which one was 
afterwards expected to discharge. I will confess that 
Dr. Morton Prince's account has not left me convinced 
that ' Sally ' had ever actually been conscious of * Miss 
Beauchamp's ' doings at the time, as of the actions of 
another person than herself. I suspect that we have here 
only a kind of illusion of the memory. ' Sally ' really, 
I should conjecture, rememhered these doings, which 
were indeed her own, since she was one person with 
' Miss Beauchamp,' and did not need to learn them from 
others or infer them from their results. But the sense of 
alienation from certain of one's own past acts which 
sometimes may in waking life make a man say : ' I cannot 
believe it was myself whom I remember doing this or that,' 
and which occasionally in dreams gives rise to an illusory 
sense of distinction from oneself, has here, I should suppose, 
been exaggerated into a kind of hallucinatory recollection 
which yet does not recall a state of mind which ever 
actually existed. I know too well how small is my 
competence in a matter of this kind to attach more than 



NATURALISM AND THE INDIVIDUAL 217 

a very trifling weight to this expression of opinion. I 
lay no stress upon what is positive in it, and only put 
it forward as an explanation of * Sally's ' assertions of 
compresence with ' Miss Beauchamp/ which, if correct, 
would disable her testimony to an actual disruption of 
the personal unity such as to present to us at one and 
the same time two persons claiming, on the evidence of 
memory, identity with one and the same person. 

It will, I hope, be clear that what I am doubting 
is the continuity of two personal consciousnesses with 
one and the same personal consciousness, and not 

I such a dissociation of elements in the same personal 
consciousness that some, while repressed and denied 

' free expression by the dominant will, may notwithstand- 
ing manifest themselves in bodily motions which the 

I person is not conscious of initiating. For this of course 
not only happens in the case of ' automatic writing ' 
and the like, but also very frequently in our everyday 
experience. I feel sure that no one can deny this who 
will pay attention to what passes in himself when endea- 
vouring by the concentration of attention upon some 
particular subject to keep some other out of his mind, 
whether it be from a wish to escape a disagreeable duty 
or to " crush," in the poet's phrase, " a vice of blood 
Upon the threshold of the mind." ^3 

(2) The second remark concerning these phenomena 
of dissociation which I desire to make is this : that the 
successful treatment of those who exhibit them with a 
view to reducing again to a unity the personality which 
has suffered dissociation appears to depend upon the use, 
as a standard and criterion, of an ideal of Personality as 
a rational and moral system of thought and action. In 
^3 Tennyson, In Memoviam, § 3. 



218 DIVINE PERSONALITY 

the instance studied in The Dissociation of a Personalily^ 
Dr. Morton Prince, who had not known the lady whom he 
calls Miss Beauchamp until she had already suffered the 
shock which resulted in the pathological conditions that 
led to his being consulted upon her case, relates how, 
as a result of his efforts at the reconstitution of the normal 
personality which had existed before the occurrence of 
that shock, he induced in her a state (distinguished by 
him as B. IV) which he took at first for the normal per- 
sonality that he was hoping to restore. In this state she 
was free alike from the morbid depression of the Miss 
Beauchamp he had first known (B I) and from the un- 
principled extravagance which distinguished the behaviour 
of ' Sally ' ; but on the other hand she lacked the more 
attractive features of both characters. She had neither 
the high ideals of the one nor the frank joie de vivre which 
gave a certain charm to the other. It is noticeable that 
Dr. Morton Prince was dissatisfied with this issue of his 
attempt at reconstruction, obviously because of its failure 
to realize the ideal of a harmonious reconciliation of all 
that was best in the various distinct and mutually dis- 
connected moods — so distinct and disconnected as to 
challenge for them the title of ' personalities ' — which 
successively manifested themselves in the physically 
continuous life of his patient. So much was he dissatis- 
fied that he renewed his hypnotic treatment and did not 
rest until a somewhat worldly and frivolous character 
was replaced by one which sufficiently realized the ideal 
suggested by the fragmentary characters hitherto suc- 
cessively displayed before his observation. This new 
condition proved to have a stability which none of its 
predecessors during the period of his acquaintance with 
the case had possessed ; and we are given in the concluding 



NATURALISM AND THE INDIVIDUAL 219 

pages of his book to understand that, when he wrote 
them, ' Miss Beauchamp ' remained in this state of mental 
and moral health, free from these abnormal interruptions 
of the continuity of her spiritual life which have made her 
so celebrated among psychologists. 

We note then that this eminent expert in mental patho- 
logy, when seeking for a criterion of personal unity, 
finds it in Reason — and in Reason not only in that narrower 
sense which abstracts from Morality, but in that wider 
sense, famiUar ahke in the common language of man- 
kind and in the teaching of the greatest philosophers, 
in which Morahty is treated as the expression of Reason 
in practice.^ So far therefore as priority can be asserted 
for one of the two principles of unity which we are con- 
sidering over the other, we here again seem to find 
that the claim of the rational principle is stronger than 
that of the personal ; though we must not forget on the 
other hand, that, if we only ascribe personality to an in- 
dividual mind according as it conforms to the rule of 
Reason, this fact in no wise enables us to conceive Reason 
except as exercised by an individual and, in virtue of this 
exercise of Reason, a personal mind. 

Before, however, we pass away from this subject, we 
may profitably take occasion by what has just been said 
to observe that the dissociation of the personal conscious- 
ness which has during recent years been studied in such 
extreme cases as that described in Dr. Morton Prince's 
book, has in less abnormal instances drawn upon itself in 
all ages the attention of moralists. I am thinking, of 
course, of the phenomena called by the Greeks oKpacria 

14 Cp. James, Princ. of Psych., ii. p. 384. " In cases " (such as some 
instanced by James) " in which the secondary character is superior 
to the first, there seems reason to think that the first one is the 
morbid one." 



220 DIVINE PERSONALITY 

and iyKpareia, in which Reason and Indination, the 
' law of the mind ' and the ' law in the members,' are 
seen striving one against the other, so that a man 
cannot do the things that he would ^ 5 (as he says if he 
identifies his will with Reason), or prays that his own 
will may not be done (if he identifies it with inclination). 
For these phenomena are phenomena of dissorAation, 
although they are not exceptional or morbid, but consti- 
tute a great part of normal human experience. 

I will not do more than refer in passing to the question 
which cannot but occur in this context as to the bearing 
of our recognition that the existence of ' dissociation ' 
is involved in our perception of the moral struggle within 
ourselves upon our view of the pathological dissociations 
of which we spoke above. While moral discord plainly 
does not as a rule lead to pathological dissociation, nor 
susceptibility to the latter go along with any special 
difficulty in securing the control of conduct by moral 
principle, yet the explanation of marked pathological 
dissociation in earlier times by diabolical possession (as 
we may reasonably suppose to be the case, for example, 
in such stories as that in the New Testament of the man 
who gave his name as Legion ^ 6)^ and the prominence of 
exorcism among the activities of the most primitiv 
period of Christian evangelization indicate a sense o 
connexion between moral weakness and mental diseas 
which finds some confirmation in the general recognition 
nowadays of the part that moral and religious influences 
may play in the cure of the latter. 

We may remark also that the temptation to speak 
of the dissociated elements of consciousness in patholo- 

15 See Rom. vii. 23. 
*^ Luke xxii. 42. 



1 



1 



NATURALISM AND THE INDIVIDUAL 221 

gical cases as separate * personalities ' is paralleled by the 
tendency visible in great investigators of man's moral 
experience, such as Plato, Aristotle, and St. Paul, to 
describe the factors in human nature which are found at 
odds in the moral struggle in terms that approach personi- 
fication of them in their separateness ; notwithstanding 
that it is the unity of the personality within which they 
are mutually opposed which gives its significance to the 
whole description. It is no less true that a fundamental 
personal unity is in fact presupposed in the accounts 
given of * pathological dissociation,' even where the word 
* personality ' is applied to each of the dissociated 
elements. 

The point is so germane to these Gifford Lectures that 
I cannot refrain from touching here upon the possibility 
which might be suggested that the ascription of Persona- 
lity to God, which is their theme, may be in fact merely 
a further stage of the personification of the parties to the 
moral struggle within human souls. The person who is 
the scene of this conflict, it may be said, identifies himself, 
as we have seen, now with one, now with another of these 
parties : the other with which he is not at the moment 
identifying himself, he tends to describe and imagine 
as another person not himself, whether he call it 
" no more I, but sin that dwelleth in me," or, on the 
other hand, " not I, but the grace of God which 
was with me." ^7 There is a plausibility in this sugges- 
tion which is due as always with genuine plausibility to 
a spice of truth which it contains. The experience of 
Religion, as I have insisted throughout, is such that any 
theology which is to give an adequate account of it 
must affirm both the transcendence and the immanence 
17 Rom. vii. 17 ; i Cor. xv. 10. 



2^2 DIVINE PERSONALITY 

of its Object, and affirm them in an intimate mutual 
connexion. But the factor in that experience which 
testifies to PersonaUty in God is to be sought not in the 
consciousness of a distinction between the combatants 
in the moral struggle within us but in the consciousness 
of obHgation which initiates the struggle, and in the sense 
of dependence upon Another than ourselves if the 
issue of the struggle is to be a victory securing to the 
higher principle its rightful authority. This is felt all 
the more strongly when we identify ourselves with that 
higher principle itself. 

But with the recognition of being under obligation and 
of dependence upon Another, and with the interpreta- 
tion of the experiences which suggest this recognition in 
terms not merely of relation to Another but of di personal 
relation to that Other, comes a further interpretation of 
the significance of the moral struggle itself which must 
inevitably seem to confirm our primitive tendency 
to personify the parties to it by envisaging the higher 
principle in it as representative of the Divine 
Personality, to the acknowledgment of which we have 
been led. 

Even this very primitive tendency itself, however, de- 
serves a careful examination, for it expresses a character- 
istic of the human soul which is of first-rate importance 
for the understanding of the problems of the moral life. 
This feature is the claim which each ideal that presents 
itself to us and our response to which embodies itself 
in a certain mood (or 'sentiment ') makes to an undivided 
allegiance from him who entertains it. I cannot turn 
aside now to dwell upon this subject ; I shall probably 
most easily suggest to you what is in my mind by reference 
to a poem of Browning's where the essence of it is put 



NATURALISM AND THE INDIVIDUAL 223 

in a very few worcjs- In this poem ^^ three ladies dispute 
of the reasons for preferring a lover. One would choose 
pure thoughts, another heroic deeds ; the third, rather 
.than either, '' a wretch, mere losel in body and soul," 
so he loved her only. And the Abbe, who is umpire, 
decides in favour of the third : 

The love which to one and one only has reference 
Seems terribl}^ like what perhaps gains God's preference. 

Many ideals challenge our allegiance ; to none can we, 
when once its appeal has really reached us, refuse recogni- 
tion without committing the greatest of sins by denying 
that to be good which we know to be so ; yet such recogni- 
tion in any case is inadequate unless it commit us to a 
self-surrender which would seem to involve a like sin 
against other ideals. Set out in psychological rather than 
in ethical terms, this situation (with which no writer has 
more constantly occupied himself than the poet to whom 
I have just resorted for a vivid expression of it) may be 
described as the tendency on the part of every ' sentiment ' 
or mood to expand itself into what, as associating itself 
with all which falls within the system of one person's 
psychical life, may be called a * personality.' The exis- 
tence of this tendency explains and gives a significance 
to the poetic or literary personification of the ' parts of 
the soul ' or of the combatants in the moral struggle of 
which I spoke above It illustrates also the truth that 
personality is essentially a principle of unity and that, 
where we are tempted to speak of the abnormal dissocia- 
tion of elements normally combined as ' multiple person- 
ality ' it is just because the unity of Personality persists 
even in such dissociation so that each dissociated element 
i8 Which ? in Asolando. 



224 DIVINE PERSONALITY 

in turn claims to possess that unity to the exclusion of 
the rest. 

The final lesson then which we may learn for our present 
purpose from the phenomena of ' multiple personality ' 
and from those more ordinary phenomena of delirium, 
dreaming, moral struggle, absent-mindedness — which in 
the light of these are seen to be, like them, phenomena 
of dissociation — is that in the life of the human soul 
there is from the first a principle of unity which is pre- 
supposed even where we seem to find the normal conscious- 
ness of it replaced by a consciousness not only of dis- 
traction but of mutual opposition ; but also that this 
principle does not from the first succeed in reducing all 
the psychical material (if the phrase may be allowed), 
within and upon which it operates, to a harmonious order 
in which it will manifestly express throughout in divers 
ways the identical nature of the whole. The unity of 
human Personality is thus an achievement, although an 
achievement which would be impossible apart from a 
principle of unity operative from the very beginning of 
what can be called personal life at all. 

It might at first seem as if this original unity could be 
no other than the unity of the bodily organism. If it 
be true that we have no experience of Reason except 
as a personal activity, it is no less true that (if we leave 
out of account the religious experience of personal inter- 
course with God, which some would assert to be no genuine 
experience at all) we have no experience of Personality 
except as expressing itself in and through an animal 
body. Moreover, in such cases of extreme distraction 
and dissociation as those which are described as exhibiting 
' multiple personality,' it is primarily and in the main 
because they express themselves through the same bodily 



NATURALISM AND THE INDIVIDUAL 225 

organism that we take ' Sally ' for the same person 
with ' Miss Beauchamp/ or, in another famous American 
case/9 the candy-store keeper A. J, Brown for the same 
person as the Baptist preacher Ansel Bourne who dis- 
appeared from the town of Greene in Rhode Island two 
months before Brown set up his business at Norristown 
in Pennsylvania. 

Why should we look further afield for an original 
unity of the person than in the unity of the organism ? 
It is true that it is by no means easy to say what it is 
that constitutes the unity of the organism itself ; but 
that is not a question upon which we can here enter. 
We may say, however, without much fear of contradiction, 
that there is nothing to suggest that a human personality 
could come into being except in connexion with a single 
organism. But it does not follow from this that we can 
identify the unity of the person, at any stage at which 
we can speak of a person at all, with the physical unity 
of the organism. The impossibility of doing this is well 
put by a thinker 2° who holds that " there is no mind without 
body," and that " mind and body are not an original 
diversity " but " the dichotomizing of an original unity," 
— a thinker who thus holds no brief for disembodied 
spirits or for a ' creationism ' (to use the old theological 
expression) which would give to the soul an origin inde- 
pendent of the physical parentage of the body. 

/' The constituent elements of the mind and the con- 
stituent elements of the body," says Professor Wildon 
Carr, " are absolutely heterogeneous and there is no 
common factor in psychical and physiological process." 



19 See James, Principles of Psychology, i. 391 ff. 

20 Prof. Wildon Carr in his Inaugural Lecture at King's College, 
London, 

15 



226 DIVINE PERSONALITY 

'' Memory and imagination do not pertain to the 

continuity of physiological process in the body, but to 

the unity and continuity of conscious experience which 

we call the personal self." '' My reason for rejecting 

the simple statement that the brain thinks is that it seems 

to me untrue in fact. I can imagine that the brain might 

think and feel and will, but what I cannot imagine is how 

thought and feelings and volitions, if they were acts of 

the brain, would form the mind. They would in a certain 

way hang together and they would have the unity which 

comes from being owned, but could they of themselves 

form an organic individual system, such as the mind is ? 

I find it then impossible to believe that, as a fact, the brain 

thinks, because I find that, as a fact, the brain is not 

the mind." 

These admirably clear remarks describe, better than 

I could do in words of my own, the real obstacle which 

exists to supposing that the unity of the personal self 

can be satisfactorily explained by reference to the unity 

of the organism, however intimately we may hold the 

two systems which we call Soul and Body to be connected 

together. 21 

21 There should perhaps here be mentioned one more considera- 
tion suggested by the doubt which the phenomena of dissociation 
seem at first sight to cast upon the stabiHty of the personal principle 
of unity in experience. If unities of experience to which the name 
of * personality ' can be plausibly applied may coalesce in a richer 
and more stable personal unity, as in the reconstitution of ' Miss 
Beauchamp ' by Dr. Morton Prince, may we not conceive of our 
normal personalities, which the presence in our thought of the 
idea of an unattained perfection convicts of being, as Descartes 
said, res incompletes, as finding completion in such union with a 
vaster life, possessing the fulness of what our personality exhibits 
only in an inferior degree, so that their consciousness of personal 
unity would disappear as completely as that of ' Sally ' in the 
life of Miss Beauchamp after her recovery ? This question is 
less relevant to the topic of the present discussion than to the 



NATURALISM AND THE INDIVIDUAL 227 

But though we shall not find in the phenomena of 
dissociation reason to dismiss the personal principle of 
unity in human experience as a mere result of the tempor- 
ary coalescence of heterogeneous units, comparable to 
the unity of a heap of sand or stones, we may certainly 
find in them some ground for regarding this principle 
as subordinate and secondary to the rational principle 
with which I contrasted it ; since this latter serves as 
a standard by which to test the claim of any system of 
conscious activities to rank as personal, while no reciprocal 
claim can be brought forward on the part of Personality 
to serve as the standard of what is rational. The attempts 
of Pragmatism and of Personal Idealism to establish the 
primacy of the personal principle we have already judged 
to be unsuccessful ; and we have thus so far found nothing 
with which we have cause to disagree in that comparative 
depreciation of this principle which is characteristic of 
thinkers who take their departure from some form of 
Absolute Idealism. 

In the next Lecture I propose to carry further the 
consideration of this comparative depreciation of 
Personality by Absolute Idealism. 

inquiry to which we shall pass in the concluding lectures of my 
course concerning the destiny of finite individual persons. But 
it may at once be said that there would be in such a consummation 
something which (if the view I took of the alleged compresence 
of two dissociated personal consciousnesses, as an illusion of the 
memory, be correct) is absent from the process to which it is sug- 
gested that it might be analogous. For there would be a single 
personal consciousness continuous with many distinct personal 
consciousnesses. And of this there seemed to be no genuine evi- 
dence within our experience. 



LECTURE IX 

ABSOLUTE IDEALISM AND THE VALUE OF 
THE INDIVIDUAL PERSON 

The depreciation of Personality from the idealistic point 
of view may be said to turn upon the consideration that, 
although a higher form of Individuality than some with 
which we are acquainted, it is yet an imperfect form, 
and has proved itself to be such by the fact that 
a person is essentially a member of a society of other 
persons, over against whom he has rights and to whom 
he has duties, and therefore cannot possess the full and 
self-sufficing individuality which belongs only to the 
Absolute. 

Now certainly the individuality which can be ascribed 
to a person among other persons is not the individuality 
which can be affirmed of the Absolute alone, and it is 
not easy to suppose that anyone would dispute this. 
But the problem of the peculiar value which may be 
claimed for Personality, as the only form in which 
Mind or Spirit is manifested within our experience as 
concrete reality, is not disposed of by this con- 
sideration. 

In studying the first series of Mr. Bosanquet's Gifford 
Lectures, to which I have so often had occasion to refer, and 
in which the view which I am now examining is set forth 
with great fulness and force, it is, I think, difficult to resist 



ABSOLUTE IDEALISM AND THE INDIVIDUAL 229 

the impression that the promise which it seemed to hold 
out of showing us what is that principium individuationis 
or ' Principle of Individuality ' in virtue of which any 
one of us is considered to be an individual remains unful- 
filled by an exposition which denies to that very Indivi- 
duality a genuine right to be called Individuality at all, 
because it is not that all-embracing and absolute self- 
sufficiency which no one ever supposed that it was, and 
the limitation to which of the name ' individual ' merely 
puts aside the question of the Individuality which we 
are accustomed to ascribe to persons. It is noticeable 
that the second series of Gifford Lectures, in which Mr 
Bosanquet really discusses this latter question, is entitled 
' The Value and Destiny of the Individual,' notwith 
standing that in the preceding course the use of the 
term ' individual ' in this sense has been described as 

* improper ' and ' incorrect.'^ Thus, I venture to think 
does the common sense of language assert itself. 

In our ordinary way of speaking an individual person 
would be considered ' concrete,' while Justice, Love 
Religion, though their names are invoked as designating 
things for which a man will dare to die — nay, would despise 
himself if he feared to die for them — would be called 

* abstract,' because they stand for a virtue, a passion, 
a faith which can exist only as belonging to individual 
persons who behave or feel or think after a certain fashion 
Against an unthinking acquiescence in such language 
philosophers of the school of Mr. Bosanquet do well to 
protest. The tendency of it is clearly revealed in the 
popular notion that ' concrete ' is a synonym for ' material ' 
or * perceptible by the senses,' ' abstract ' for * immaterial ' 
or ' imperceptible.' It encourages the prejudice that 

I Principle of Individuality and Value, pp. 288, 311. 



230 DIVINE PERSONALITY 

what the senses can apprehend is the sole genuine reahty, 
a prejudice which, if not altogether incompatible with 
philosophy of any sort, is at least irreconcilable with 
any that could allow validity to Religion. 

But the protest against it takes, as it seems to me, a 
form open to serious criticism when it treats the nature 
of individual persons as adjectival,^ not merely because, 
apart from certain relations to other persons and things, 
they would not be what they are (just as those other persons 
and things would not be what they are apart from certain 
relations to them), but because they, it is said, belong to 
the ultimate Reality as it does not belong to them ; 
much as, in the ordinary view, musical taste or a fair 
complexion (to take the Aristotelian examples) may be 
characteristics of a certain man, yet this relation cannot 
be reciprocated. Nay it is not only in respect to the 
ultimate or absolute Reality that Personality (or any 
kind of finite Individuality) is held by Mr. Bosanquet 
and those who think with him to be adjectival. When 
the scholar or the patriot or the martyr gives himself up 
to death in the service of learning or of his country or of 
his creed, he confesses, it may be said, that that for which 
he is content to sacrifice his life is the substance of which 
his individual personality is but a transient expression, and 
apart from which it has no significance. Can we speak 
of his personality as existing in its own right, as it were, 
even though what gives it all its worth and interest should 
perish ? " Who dies if England hves ? " 3 Does not the 

2 See the Symposium on Do Finite Individuals possess a Substantive 
or an Adjectival Mode of Being in Proc. of Ar. Soc, vol. xviii. ; 
published in Life and Finite Individuality, 1918 ; see esp. pp. 83, 
127 ff. 

3 Kipling, For All we Have and Are, 1914 {^The Years Between, 
P- 23). 



I 



ABSOLUTE IDEALISM AND THE INDIVIDUAL 231 

question, do not still more the deaths of the multitudes 
who without hesitation have died that England might 
live, witness against the claim of the individual person 
to a substantiality to which the feelings and convictions, 
the manners and ideals, which distinguish one nation 
from another are but * adjectives ' ? Is not rather the 
reverse nearer to the truth ? 

Such is the case for the view that human Personality, 
like every other form of finite Individuality, is ' adjectival.* 
Unquestionably it must give pause to those who use 
language which might seem to ascribe to Personality a su- 
preme value and dignity in abstraction from the interests, 
the ideals, and the objects of attention which give to it 
character and import. But it does not convince me that 
it affords a justification for using language so paradoxical 
in the opposite direction as that which treats of a self- 
conscious subject of experience as in the same class with 
what has no conceivable being except as an ' adjective ' 
of something else. 

We will therefore try to examine somewhat more 
closely this view of finite Personality as * adjectival.* 
We shall find, I think, that it resolves finite Personality 
into two factors : one being the assemblage of characteris- 
tics which distinguish one person from another, and each 
of which is in the traditional sense of the word, a * uni- 
versal,* which might belong equally well to several in- 
dividuals ; and a ' thisness ' which is just the bare form 
of Individuality, and may be regarded as itself a * universal,* 
inasmuch as any person may be (nay, every person must 
be) in a particular context ' this person.* It may then be 
said with some plausibility : What is more abstract, 
more empty than this latter ? Any individual will 
fit it quite as well as any other. What more elusive 



232 DIVINE PERSONALITY 

and transitory ? Like a shifting gleam of light, it 
falls now on one, now on another ; from moment to 
moment, from spot to spot, we have a different * this ' 
before us. 

On the other hand, when we turn to the characteristics 
which do permanently or at least importantly distinguish 
one person from another as ' thisness ' does not, they are 
admittedly * universal ' ; singly, nay even in combination, 
they may belong to several individuals, who might thus, 
if not juxtaposed in time or space, be ' indiscernible ' 
by sense or thought. 

Nevertheless, I think it may be shown that this analysis 
of finite individual Personality is incomplete. When 
Mr. Bosanquet,4 in speaking of the finite ' individual ' 
which is often said to be ' concrete ' in distinction from 
the ' universal ' which is called ' abstract,' describes 
it as ' the given person or thing,' he surely does some 
injustice to those whom he is criticizing. We are not here 
concerned with things ; I will therefore confine myself 
for the moment to persons, without asking myself how far 
what is said of persons can be extended to things as welL 

When we speak of ' a person ' as concrete we are certainly 
thinking of much more than can be said to be ' given ' 
in a particular experience of that person. We sometimes 
hear of some one presenting to his acquaintance * a mere 
mask.' What is meant by such phrases is just this : 
that, in these instances, it is only what is ' given ' that 
we are allowed to know. But we might express this 
otherwise by saying that we had never come into contact 
with the real person. When we speak of individual persons 
as pre-eminently concrete realities we always suppose 

4 In his review of my Group Theories of Religion in Mind for 
Jan. 1917. 



ABSOLUTE IDEALISM AND THE INDIVIDUAL 233 

that there is much more included in their reaHty than 
what is ' given ' in any particular experience of intercourse 
with them. 5 

Again, although it is true that the characteristics which 
distinguish one person from another are, taken by them- 
selves or even as an aggregate, * universal ' — that is, 
may be found in several distinct individual persons — 

5 Cp. Professor Stout, Life and Finite Individuality, p. 143. 
" Mr. Bosanquet seems always to take for granted that nothing 
can belong to the nature of the finite individual except his finitude. 
Whatever is positive in his being is regarded as apart from and 
independent of his limitation. He is distinguished from other 
beings and from the all-inclusive Universe not by what he is but 
merely by what he is not. It is this presupposition alone which 
gives point to Mr. Bosanquet's denial of the worth of the finite 
individual qua finite. What he is constantly manifesting is that 
finitude is mere defeat or limitation, and that therefore what is 
finite cannot have value in so far as it is finite. It is plain that 
this argument loses its force, if there are characteristics of the 
finite individual, which, though they are themselves positive and 
of positive value, none the less presuppose his limitation, so that 
they could not belong to a being which was not finite. But there 
are such characteristics. . . ." Mr. Bosanquet would probably 
reply that this criticism misses its mark, since he would not deny 
that individual personality (though, as he says, rather a personality 
than our personality) is essential to some features of Reality which 
are of very great value, such as loyalty or love. And the person- 
ality essential to these is for him, we must note, finite personality 
such as yours or mine, since he neither agrees with Lotze in allow- 
ing Personality to be attributable to the Infinite nor with Dr. 
Rashdall believes in a supremely perfect and eternal though finite 
Person, the Creator of persons like ourselves and the proper object 
of their reverence and worship. This view of the place of Person- 
ality in the system of Reality may undoubtedly be held in a general 
estimate of Mr. Bosanquet's position to balance the depreciatory 
language concerning it against which Prof. Stout's remarks are 
directed. But it does not acquit that language of blame on the 
score of one-sidedness ; nor does it hinder a theistic student of 
Mr. Bosanquet's philosophy from suspecting that his refusal to 
admit the notion of Divine Personality into it has resulted in a 
certain failure to reconcile two aspects of Personality in general 
which are severally recognized in his work. 



234 DIVINE PERSONALITY - 

yet the principle of unity according to which they are 
combined in an individual Personality is in each case I 
unique and is not identifiable with, nor, except from defect } 
of apprehension in the observer, indiscernible from the ! 
principle according to which they are combined in any 
other. Nor do I think that the nature of this principle \ 
can be better distinguished from that of any principle J 
which is in the proper sense ' universal ' than by some ^ 
such phraseology as that old Aristotelian one of * Subject ' 
and ' Attribute ' which has so long commended itself to the 
reflective common-sense of mankind. So much would, 
I believe, be true, even if one did not attach a higher 
value to the individual Personality in the scheme of 
things than Mr. Bosanquet and those who hold with 
him are disposed to attach to it, and might most 
certainly be allowed without committing oneself to any 
assertion of such a permanence of individual persons as 
is claimed by believers in what is called ' personal 
immortality.' 

It may, however, be said — as it is by Mr. Bradley ^ — 
that when we consider the relation between souls and the 
thoughts which belong to them, we find ourselves en- 
tangled in a " vicious circle," and ought to infer from this 
discovery that we are " in the realm of appearance " 
and therefore cannot ascribe ultimate reality to the things 
— souls in this case — ^of which we are speaking. 

" For thought is a state of souls and therefore is made 
by them, while, upon its side, the soul is a product of 
thought. The * thing,' existing in time and possessor 
of ' states,' is made what it is by ideal construction. But 
this construction itself appears to depend on a psychical 
centre, and to exist merely as its ' state. 
6 Appearance and Reality, p. 306. 



> >> 



ABSOLUTE IDEALISM AND THE INDIVIDUAL 235 

To deal adequately with this passage would involve 
an examination of the whole philosophy of Mr. Bradley, 
such as it would be out of the question to undertake 
here. I will therefore grant what is here said of the 
' thing ' to be true, although I doubt myself whether it 
would not be a better way of stating the facts which Mr. 
Bradley has in view to say that it is discovered by an 
act of constructive thought to be what it is, a change of 
expression which would imply a good deal of difference 
in the interpretation of the facts in question. But it is 
sufficient for my present purpose to point out that the 

* psychical centre ' seems to fall outside the circle, ' vicious * 
or otherwise, which Mr. Bradley has indicated. For it 
is not that " thing, existing in time and possessor of 
states " which he has to his own satisfaction shown to 
be a result of ' ideal construction.' Thought is a state 
of such a thing — called a soul — and this soul is a product 
of thought. Here is our vicious circle. How does the 

* psychical centre,' which is apparently distinguished from 
the ' soul,' come in ? If Mr. Bradley merely means 
to suggest that the ideal construction which constitutes 
the ** thing with states " called a soul itself presupposes 
a soul, why this variation of the phrase ? May it not be 
that we have here in fact a covert admission of something 
which resists the alchemy of his dialectical method ? 
The suspicion is encouraged by the admission, which we 
elsewhere find, that to Mr. Bradley there is something 
peculiarly mysterious and baffling in what he describes 
as the Absolute's division of itself into finite centres of 
experience, outside of which he is disposed to doubt whether 
any experience falls. 7 

7 See Appearance and Reality, p. 527. Cp. Essays in Truth and 
Reality, p. 350 n. Cp. also Prof. Baillie [Idealistic Construction of 



236 DIVINE PERSONALITY 

I am very far from suggesting that I have any explana- 
tion to give of the existence of individual persons or 
' finite centres of experience * which would make it from 
Mr. Bradley's point of view less mysterious and baffling. 
Is there not, however, reason for wondering whether the 
fact of their existence and its inexplicability from that 
point of view does not cast doubt on the whole theory 
which ascribes reality in the proper sense to the One 
Absolute alone ? 

Thus in the end it is not only for the ' Personal Idealist ' 
that Personality is found to resist analysis by the method 
which has sapped the claim of everything else to inde- 
pendent reality ; the same thing has happened for his 
critics also. Only it is as in the old jest about Hume 
and Reid.^ Reid (it was said) shouts, ' You cannot help 
believing in an external world,' and then whispers, ' But 
you can give no reason for your belief.' Hume shouts, 
' You can give no adequate reason for retaining any belief 
in the external world,* then he adds in a whisper, ' But 
you cannot get rid of the belief.' Put the personal idealist 
for Reid, and Mr. Bradley or Mr. Bosanquet for Hume ; 
for ' the external world ' substitute ' the substantial 
reality of the personal self ; ' and all the rest may be left 
standing to serve our present purpose. Nor are these 
same opponents so far removed from one another as 
one might expect in their treatment of that other principle 
of unity in experience which we may call Reason, between 
which and the principle of Personality a question of 

Experience, p. 35) on " the general problem of showing how experience 
becomes individuated." Is there not a question begged in the use 
of * becomes ' here ? Why should he — should we — assume that it is 
not individuated from the first ? 

s I do not know the original source of this epigram. See Wilfrid 
Ward's Last Lectures, p. 192. 



ABSOLUTE IDEALISM AND THE INDIVIDUAL 237 

priority arose in the preceding Lecture. For Reason 
or Thought is not conceivable apart from a subject ; and 
none is provided by either of the two schools which I 
have mentioned except finite persons. But these, on 
the showing of either, are inadequate to the unity of 
subject which seems to be demanded by the unity of 
Reason. Such an Absolute Idealist as Mr. Bradley or 
Mr. Bosanquet proclaims aloud this inadequacy, which 
the Personal Idealist only admits by substituting under 
his breath for the identity in the content of Reason a 
mere similarity or a miraculously inexplicable coincidence. 
What seems to be required is a whole-hearted recogni- 
tion at once of the genuine unity of the content, or (as I 
should prefer to say) of the object of Reason — of that which 
we may call the world of Ideas, in the Platonic sense of 
that word — and also of the unity of each personal subject 
as a substantial element in the system of Reality, and not 
merely an adjective qualifying it. 9 

9 A contemporary thinker, Dr. M'Taggart, has put forward a 
view of the world which might seem to fulfil this requirement. 
In this view the ultimate Reality consists of persons each of whom 
is an eternal differentiation of the Absolute. Despite, however, 
the ingenuity and suggestiveness of Dr. M'Taggart in meeting 
the obvious difficulties in his scheme, I find myself unable to accept 
a doctrine like that which Dr. M'Taggart shares with the younger 
Fichte (in his Seelenfortdauer) of the pre-existence of human souls 
in complete independence of the souls of those who are the pro- 
genitors of the bodies that now serve them for organs of expression. 
Moreover, neither the idealism of Dr. M'Taggart, which resolves 
the ' external world ' into states of a knowing subject, nor his 
' atheism,' which leave no proper object for religion, appears to 
me to do justice to the facts of our experience. Mr. Bosanquet 
{Value and Destiny, p. 258, n. i) has made a distinction (though, 
as Professor Pringle Pattison has pointed out in his Idea of God, 
p. 275, he has not always strictly observed it) between ' elements ' 
and ' members ' of the Absolute. In his own view finite persons 
are the former, in Dr. M'Taggart 's the latter. I should have no 
objection to speaking of them as ' elements ' of the Absolute, if 



238 DIVINE PERSONALITY 

The contention that the selfhood of finite persons must 
be considered as merely 'adjectival ' is in the thought of 
those who maintain it closely bound up with insistence 
upon the ethical principle of self-realization by means 
of self-surrender, which has received classical expression 
in the great saying of Jesus : " Whosoever will save his 
life shall lose it ; but whosoever shall lose his life for my 
sake and the gospel's the same shall find it/' or, as it is 
rendered in the Fourth Gospel : " He that loveth his life 
loseth it ; and he that hateth his life in this world shall 
keep it unto life eternal." ^o The principle that a man can 
only find his true self in the highest sense when, in the 
service of some cause which he values more than he 
values his own separate individual personal self, he is 
ready to sacrifice not only all that he possesses, but all 
that he is — this principle, it may be suggested, is not 
really accepted with one's whole heart so long as anything 
is held back, whether it be an ' immortal soul ' or a meta- 
physical substantiality. This line of argument cannot but 
have a certain persuasiveness for those to whom the 
moral and religious ideals of Christendom are precious. 
They are apt to ask themselves whether by clinging to a 
belief in a future life for themselves, or even to a philoso- 
phical theory which gives to their own personality a ' sub- 
stantive ' rank, they are not after all convicting them- 
selves of unwillingness to complete the renunciation of 
self which they profess and involving themselves in the 
guilt of Ananias and Sapphira." 

that word were used (as it might be) without prejudice to their 
claim to be considered ' substantial ' rather than ' adjectival.' 
' Members,' on the other hand, suggests (as I suppose it is intended 
to do) Dr. M'Taggart's ' world of immortals without a God.' And 
this, as I have said, I could not accept. 

" Mark viii. 35 ; John xii. 25. " See Acts v. i ff. 



ABSOLUTE IDEALISM AND THE INDIVIDUAL 239 

But I think that one may be too soon put out of counte- 
nance by this sort of consideration. We shall find it pro- 
fitable to examine more closely the actual facts of such 
self-surrender as is supposed to commit those who approve 
it to a sacrifice of their hopes of personal immortality 
and of their faith in the substantive reality of their personal 
selves. Of ' personal immortality ' I will say nothing at 
present ; it will occupy our attention in my next and 
concluding Lecture. I will confine myself in this to the 
light thrown by the actual working of the ethical principle 
of self-realization by self-surrender upon that depreciation 
of the value of finite Personality as compared with the 
ideals inspiring such self-surrender which is sometimes 
associated with emphasis upon that principle. 

Let us take as our instance the self-devotion of the patriot 
who gives his life for his country. It is probable that, in 
the majority of cases, the country for which he sacrifices 
himself represents itself to his imagination as a system of 
personal relations which is the familiar and beloved setting 
of his own personal experience ; including no doubt 
not persons only ; for the places and the houses in which 
he has lived, the buildings which are haunted by the 
memories of his childhood, his school or his universitj^ 
or the home of his early married life, will be no small 
part of it ; yet all as associated with parents and kinsfolk 
and teachers and friends and companions, with wife and 
children and neighbours and colleagues, the persons who 
belong to him and to whom he belongs. 

One knows how often patriotic sentiment has been 
concentrated in loyal passion for a king, who is an actual 
person, for whom his soldiers and subjects are proud 
to fight and to die ; and yet it is noteworthy that in a 
well-known song, written for the very purpose of substitut- 



240 DIVINE PERSONALITY 

ing for such loyalty to the head of the State an enthusiasm 
for the multitude of its citizens, the appeal is made on 
the ground that so the object of our devotion will have 
become not less, but more personal : 

The people. Lord, the people ! 

Not thrones and crowns, but men." 

Thus we see that while the strength of one form of devo- 
tion to the community lies in the undeniable personality 
of the monarch in contrast to what may seem to be the 
mere abstraction of a commonwealth, in its rival the 
personality of the monarch is dropped out of sight and 
' the people ' as a number of actual human beings is put 
forward in contrast, not with a single person, but only 
with the outward material symbols of public authority. 
So far then I do not think that the facts of patriotic self- 
devotion can be said to support any depreciation of individ- 
ual personality as compared with a ' universal,' of which 
by sacrificing itself thereto it confesses itself to be no 
more than a transitory organ or vehicle. We rather find 
persons sacrificing themselves for other persons. This 
no doubt implies the reality of the unity within which 
these persons are mutually related and which itself consists 
in these mutual relations of persons ; but it does not 
subordinate the individual personalities in the way and 
to the degree which certain theories seem to require. 

But we may be asked what we should say of the 
sacrifice of his own life along with his nation's in 
a desperate cause by the member of a community so 
small and isolated that it might possibly be exterminated 
by massacre or famine, where the dying patriot would 

" Ebenezer Elliott, The People's Anthem {Poetical Works ii., 
203). 



ABSOLUTE IDEALISM AND THE INDIVIDUAL 241 

rather his people perished from the face of the earth 
than denied their ancestral religion or repudiated their 
obligation to some other community ? Is not the main- 
tenance of something which would be called ' abstract ' 
by those for whom the individual alone is fully concrete 
here preferred to that of any individual person or persons 
concerned ? And yet do we not approve the preference 
and admire the self-sacrifice ? 

It is important at this point to avoid so far as possible 
a familiar misunderstanding. If we suggest that, in 
such a case as that which has just been stated, there must 
be taken into account the feeling of self-respect which the 
person sacrificing himself would know he could not hope 
to enjoy if he refused to share his people's doom, or the 
approbation of his conduct by all who may come to 
know of it among mankind, or even by 

those pure eyes 
And perfect witness of all-judging Jove,i3 

we may be supposed to be falling into the old error 
of those whom their critics call the ' psychological 
hedonists,' and to be placing the worth of conduct in 
the emotional gratification which it may excite, not- 
withstanding that this very gratification presupposes 
an apprehension of that worth. For, unless the con- 
duct in question were thought to possess such worth, 
the gratification could not arise and, unless it really 
possessed it, would not be justified. 

Assuredly we must be careful not simply to set up 

against what seems to us an illegitimate abstraction from 

individual persons of universals, such as the principles 

and causes for which men will die, an equally illegitimate 

13 Milton, Lycidas. 

16 



242 DIVINE PERSONALITY 

abstraction of individual persons from such principles 
and causes as impart to them dignity and purpose in life. 
But we may nevertheless be able to show reason for 
holding that individual Personality cannot satisfactorily 
be regarded merely as a vehicle or organ of these principles 
or causes, or even of the life of a community highly organized 
enough to be capable of acting or suffering itself as a 
* person ' at law. 

No doubt it may be said that those who hold the lan- 
guage which we are now censuring for an undue deprecia- 
tion of individual Personality as being a mere vehicle 
or organ of a higher life are far from wishing to imply 
that individual Personality is a vehicle or organ which 
might be dispensed with altogether. They would not 
deny that it is an element, even (if we will) a necessary 
element, in the whole system of Reality. Indeed this 
may be allowed to be true of every form of 
existence. 

But, without forgetting the evidence on the other side 
of such memoranda of old experience as that which tells 
us that * there is no man who is indispensable,' we must, 
I think, if we are to be true to the facts, acknowledge 
also that the value which we assign to our own personality 
and to that of others with whom we have in a genuine 
sense personal acquaintance is not that of something which 
can really be replaced by anything else of the same sort 
(even by one which we should not hesitate to describe 
as better or nobler), in the same sense in which a mere 
thing could be so replaced. It is upon this peculiarity 
in the value which may be claimed for persons, who exist 
not only in but for themselves, that Royce's doctrine of 
Individuality as the embodiment of a unique purpose 
is based ; and, without necessarily embracing this doctrine 



ABSOLUTE IDEALISM AND THE INDIVIDUAL 243 

in its developed form, we may admit the fact which it 
is intended to explain. 

Nor need we hesitate to admit this fact as regards persons 
because one may not at once be certain that some things 
which are not persons nor even organisms — for example, 
works of architecture, sculptures, or paintings — may 
not share this peculiar character. Yet it is difficult to 
be sure that they do share it, apart from their association 
with individual persons. It is true that one may doubt 
not unreasonably the possibility of the exact reproduction 
of a great work of art in this kind by anyone but the 
original architect or painter. But if such an exact repro- 
duction were to be achieved, would not that which would 
be lacking to the reproduction be merely its association 
with the person of its designer, an association which we 
should value just as we should value for a like association 
the autograph manuscript of a great poem or symphony, 
though we should not suppose it to possess a higher 
artistic value as literature or as music than would belong 
to a copy made by another hand ? 

Whatever we may hold regarding things, we may, I 
think, say of persons not only that we are unable to conceive 
those principles, causes, or communities for which persons 
sacrifice themselves as actually existing otherwise than as 
they are embodied in persons, are carried out by persons, 
or consist of persons, but that we shall hardly fail 
to find ourselves profoundly dissatisfied if we are convinced 
that the object to which persons have sacrificed themselves 
is never and nowhere realized except as an aim unfulfilled 
in any personal hfe as real as that which has been surren- 
dered in its service ; that not only have the heroes of our 
race *' died in faith, not having received the promises," ^4 

14 Heb. xi. 13. 



244 DIVINE PERSONALITY 

but these promises are never received and never can be 
received by any persons whatever. 

In saying this I am not, I think, going beyond what 
has been very emphatically said by Green in a passage 
of his Prolegomena to Ethics, ^S to which Mr. Bosanquet 
has thought it desirable in his Value and Destiny of the 
Individual to supply a commentary which shall make it 
consistent with the depreciation of individual Personality 
characteristic of his own idealism. To do this he accepts 
an alternative suggested by Green himself to the continu- 
ance of the personal life in a society " which shares in 
and carries further every measure of perfection attained 
by men under the conditions of life that we know." For 
such a continuance as this there is no room in Mr. Bosan- 
quet 's scheme ; but when Green adds the words *' or 
we may content ourselves with saying that the personal 
self-conscious being which comes from God, is for ever 
continued in God," his commentator interprets this as 
an indication that, in adding the reflection that *' a 
capacity which is nothing except as personal cannot 
be realized in any impersonal modes of being," he may 
be understood to be insisting " not primarily that the 
goal of development should be our personality but that 
it shall be a personality ; and the doctrine," he goes on, 
" has nothing against its being more than a personahty, so 
long as in it all that constituted ourself can have fuller 
justice done to it than in our given self^^ it ever could 
have." In other words, it may be the individual but in 
no intelligible sense personal Absolute of Mr. Bosanquet's 
own philosophy.'? 

15 § 185. See Bosanquet, Value and Destiny, pp. 279 ff. 

16 Here we have the ambiguous use of the word ' given ' noticed 
above on p. 232. 

17 Cp. Prof. Pringle Pattison, Idea of God, pp. 270 foil. 



ABSOLUTE IDEALISM AND THE INDIVIDUAL 245 

I leave to my concluding Lecture the inquiry whether 
we should be satisfied in the last resort with the complete 
disappearance of any persons " not having received the 
promises " which had during their earthly pilgrimage 
sustained their spiritual life. I will not question the 
possibility of a devotion which is content wholly and for 
ever to go without what is given to others. And no doubt 
there is often in fact no very vivid imagination, in the 
person who makes the sacrifice, of those others' enjoyment 
of what is given to them although, when this enjoy- 
ment is imagined, its probable or certain transiency 
and imperfection is apt to be forgotten. But it is unsatis- 
factory to think that we can only find what we count as 
the noblest satisfaction which we can have, so long as its 
true nature is hidden from our eyes. We are reminded 
of the old familiar ' paradox of hedonism ' that virtue 
can have no justification except as a means to pleasure, 
but yet that it will fail to bring us pleasure, if, while 
practising it, we keep this, its true end, steadily in view. 
Just so, if we clearly apprehend that only in a personal 
life can the object for the sake of which we are called upon 
to surrender our personal life be an enjoyed reality, while 
yet we know of no personal life in which it can be more 
than an ideal to be striven after without expectation of 
personal enjoyment, we shall not indeed find that we 
can without violating our conscience refuse the surrender, 
but we shall hardly escape a despairing confession that 
there yawns between the ideal and the real, the ' ought 
to be ' and the 'is,' a gulf which the dogmas of Mr. Bosan- 
quet's philosophy will not avail to bridge. 

It was precisely in order, by bridging this gulf, 
to secure our moral convictions — not in order to 
supply a sanction for the Categorical Imperative whose 



246 DIVINE PERSONALITY 

'' manifest authority " '^ stands in need of none — that 
Kant postulated the existence of God. The actual ex- 
perience in Religion of personal communion with God — 
apart from the existence of which, as a fact of history, 
there would indeed have been nothing to put this 
expedient into Kant's hand — affords as nothing else 
can do a ground for faith in the survival of those 
ideals for which we are called upon to sacrifice ourselves, 
in the only fashion in which ideals can survive or live at 
all, namely, as included in a personal experience. Thus 
it is that the contribution which, as I argued in my earlier 
course. Religion makes to our conception of the supreme 
Reality, is found to aid us in deahng with the problem, 
which so deeply troubled the soul of Kant, the problem of 
the discrepancy between what ought to be and what is 
— a problem which the later development of Absolute 
Idealism, while effectively criticizing some of Kant's as- 
sumptions and showing that Practical and Theoretical 
Philosophy do not stand over against one another, the 
one only concerned with one of these two great opposites 
and the other with the other, has nevertheless failed to 
do more than restate in terms in some respects less open 
to objection than his. 

It is noteworthy that an able American writer, whom 
I quoted in a previous Lecture,'? and who would be quite 
out of sympathy with the Theism which I am defending, 
Professor Parker of Michigan, suggests that we may find 
a justification of human failure and death in the supposition 
that they minister to the development of beings far higher 
than we. Such a supposition might, on the hypothesis 
of an immanent teleology in Nature, explain, but could 

1 8 Butler, Second Sermon on Human Nature. 

19 See above, pp. 114 fE. 



ABSOLUTE IDEALISM AND THE INDIVIDUAL 247 

not console ; since it is not suggested that there exist 
or might exist between us and these higher beings any 
such personal relations as in Religion we experience or 
think we experience with God, and through God with all 
spirits human or unknown who, like ourselves, live and 
move and have their being in him. The writer I am 
quoting could only, I feel convinced, give to his specula- 
tion anything of the consolatory power which faith in 
God may possess by doing explicitly what he occasionally 
does implicitly, and perhaps not quite intentionally, — 
treating, that is to say, what he calls ' Nature ' as in fact 
a worshipful Being entitled to the name of * God.' 

We may then follow Green in holding that the doctrine 
of Personality in God which is suggested to us by religious 
experience sets the central fact of moral experience, the 
fact of self-sacrifice, in a new light. We shall be in 
agreement with Mr. Bosanquet, and no doubt with Green 
himself, in saying that, in speaking of Personality in God, 
we do not mean to deny that Personality in God must 
be more and other than it is in man ; but we shall differ 
from Mr. Bosanquet (though I venture to doubt whether 
we shall not be nearer than he to what was in the mind of 
Green) in that we shall insist that Personality in God must 
mean at least the possibility of such a genuine personal 
intercourse between our souls and him as can find no 
place in the philosophy of the younger thinker. 

So far we may go without raising the question whether 
we can suppose the individual human personality to 
survive the apparent cessation of its activities at death 
and the subsequent disappearance of the body which has 
been the sole organ and vehicle of those activities. The 
practical and historical importance of this question is 
nevertheless so great that, although I do not pretend to 



248 DIVINE PERSONALITY 

have anything to say concerning it which is either new 
or interesting, the present discussion would be felt by every- 
one to be incomplete without some consideration of it. 
To such a consideration I will pass in my next and con- 
cluding Lecture, but I will before bringing the present 
Lecture to a close preface what I shall then say by a few 
remarks upon the spirit in which I should desire to 
approach it. 

It is clear that, in venturing upon ground haunted by 
the most sacred affections and hopes of multitudes of 
our fellow men, one who speaks, however unworthily, 
from the place of such men as have preceded me on the 
foundation of Lord Gifford, cannot but incur a grave 
responsibihty. On the one hand he runs the risk of 
making sad the hearts of any who may honour him with 
their attention, by disappointing the hope which they 
may have formed that he would be able to reassure them 
by arguments, strong enough to dispel invading doubts, 
of the reasonableness of a faith which they feel to be 
necessary if they are not to succumb under the weight 
of life's sorrows. On the other hand he is exposed to the 
temptation of forsaking the path of honest inquiry into 
truth in order to prophesy smooth things to himself and 
others. In these circumstances the best he can do is 
to speak as sincerely and as reverently as he can, to 
pretend to no more or less certainty than it has been 
given him to attain ; and, in a matter where individual 
temperament and taste inevitably exercise so great an 
influence upon every man's opinion, to put forward 
frankly and modestly that which he has himself found, 
for what it is worth, avoiding all needless offence to the 
feeHngs of others and claiming no pecuhar or exceptional 
value for his own. 



ABSOLUTE IDEALISM AND THE INDIVIDUAL 249 

If this course be taken, no mischief can be done, but 
rather some good, by throwing one's own thoughts upon 
this subject into the common stock. This is the least 
that can be expected from a professional student of the 
Philosophy of Religion, and the most that, if prudent, 
he will profess himself competent to do. 

In undertaking this task, however, I shall not attempt 
a general survey of the problem of human Immortality, 
but shall endeavour to concentrate attention upon the 
hope of a life beyond death which springs from the religious 
experience of personal communion with the Eternal 
Being. I shall not altogether ignore other aspects of the 
question ; but I shall only consider them so far as they 
reinforce on the one hand or as they weaken on the 
other the strictly religious hope which is alone germane 
to our present main inquiry. 



LECTURE X 

THE DESTINY OF THE INDIVIDUAL PERSON 

In his striking Gifford Lectures, to which I have already 
several times referred, on The Value and Destiny of the 
Individual,^ Mr. Bosanquet has quoted from the letters 
of Keats a remarkable description of this world in which 
our earthly lives are passed as ' The Vale,' not of tears, 
but ' of Soul-making/ This description Mr. Bosanquet 
accepts as a true description, not indeed of the Absolute 
which is eternal, and which we cannot regard as a process 
in time, whether of soul-making or of anything else, 
but of the Universe as finite. ^ 

Nevertheless it seems a strange description to accept 
even of the Universe * as finite * or in time for one who 
holds (as Mr. Bosanquet holds) that the souls are made 
only to be as souls destroyed. 3 

Nor does it help us to say, as Mr. Bosanquet does in 
reply to a critic of this language,4 that the souls are not 
destroyed but only remade. This is enough indeed for 

1 Value and Destiny of the Individual, p. 63. See Keats's Letters, 
ed. Colvin, p. 255 ; ed. Buxton Formaii, p. 326. 

2 Cf. Pringle Pattison, Idea of God, pp. 278, 279. 

3 Cf. my Group Theories of Religion, p. 193 n. The same 
objection has since been strongly put by Prof. Pringle Pattison 
in the passage just cited from his Aberdeen Gifford Lectures on 
The Idea of God. 

4 Prof. Pringle Pattison. See Mr. Bosanquet's review of his 
Idea of God, in Mind for Oct. 19 17. 

230 



THE DESTINY OF THE INDIVIDUAL 251 

Mr. Bosanquet, because he holds that the persistence of 
the ' values ' on which persons have set their hearts is 
all that we have any true interest in demanding ; a soul 
' remade/ in the sense which the phrase seems to be in- 
tended by Mr. Bosanquet tobear,is in fact another later-born 
soul setting its heart on or even realizing the same values, 
and will not, for those to whom it seems that the unique 
personality of any one of them is itself a value calling for 
conservation, be in any intelligible sense the same soul 
at all. They will be disposed to retort upon Mr. Bosanquet 
with Aristotle's remark 5 that no one makes it his personal 
aim to possess all that is good on condition of having 
become a quite different person : for that would mean 
only that some one else possessed it ; and in fact (Aristotle 
goes on to observe), so far as that goes, some one else 
already as it is possesses the supreme good, namely God. 
To Aristotle, we must remember, God is altogether another 
than we and not our higher Self or the Soul of our soul ; 
so that it would not be a relevant criticism upon this 
passage to say that one who, like Green,^ thought of God 
very differently, can speak as though the continuance 
in God of the life which is now ours would perhaps satisfy 
our aspiration after the immortality of our own Soul. 
I do not indeed wish to deny that the conservation of 
the values on which we have set our hearts in the life and 
consciousness of others is a possible and a worthy ideal, 
but only that there is, as Mr. Bosanquet seems to suggest, 
nothing of positive significance or worth in the hope of 
personal Immortality beside this. 

In one of the Lectures of my former course I adverted 
to a certain difference which I thought could be detected 

5 Eth. Nic. ix. 4, 1166 a 210 ff. 

6 Prolegomena to Ethics, § 185. See above, p. 244. 



252 DIVINE PERSONALITY 

between the attitude of Mr. Bosanquet and that of a 
philosopher with whom he is for the most part in close 
sympath}^, I mean Mr. Bradley, towards the relation between 
the object of Religion and that of Metaphysics ; and 
I said that an analogous difference would be found to 
exist between the attitudes taken up by these two eminent 
thinkers respectively toward the belief in a future life. 7 
We found Mr. Bosanquet apparently convinced that his 
philosophy of the Absolute is competent to supply to 
Religion all the sustenance which it requires, so that there 
is nothing of essential importance to Religion in the 
faith of the great prophets, doctors and poets of Christen- 
dom which that philosophy cannot appropriate.^ We 
found Mr. Bradley on the other hand acutely conscious 
of the inability of his metaphysical doctrine to supply 
the place of a Religion, and expressing his hopes of the 
rise of a new Religion which might live alongside of that 
doctrine more harmoniously than any now existing. 
The difference is real, though perhaps one rather arising 
from a difference in temperament and feeling than lending 
itself to formulation in opposed propositions. 

Now in regard to a future life for individual persons 
we find much the same contrast between the same two 
philosophers. To neither does the evidence of a future 
life appear strong, still less convincing. To Mr. Bosanquet 
this appears no matter for regret, and he is satisfied 
with the confidence which his philosophy gives him in the 
eternal security in the Absolute of those values whereon 
our hearts are set ; for there is, he thinks, nothing more 
that we need desire. And so he does not care to leave a 

7 God and Personality, p. 144. 

8 See 'Are we Agnostics ? ' in The Civilization of Christendom 
(1893), p. 141. 



THE DESTINY OF THE INDIVIDUAL 253 

door open for speculations and hopes which he regards 
as groundless and empty of real value. 

Mr. Bradley, on the other hand, strikes a different note. 
One perceives that he has a genuine sympathy with 
desires for personal reunion with departed friends which 
yet he suspects of an inherent self-contradiction, and does 
not care decisively to shut the door upon the speculations 
and hopes which he, no more than Mr. Bosanquet, sees 
his way to encourage. It is a result of this divergence of 
sentiment — for it is a divergence of sentiment rather than 
of opinion — that the religious philosophy of Mr. Bosanquet 
wears an air of almost inhuman serenity while dismissing 
much that has been precious to many generations of our 
spiritual forefathers, and is still precious to multitudes of 
our fellow men ; while in that of Mr. Bradley we find, 
on the other hand, a very human melancholy, as of one 
who, with all his devotion to his chosen task of following 
the argument whithersoever it may lead him, is yet pro- 
foundly convinced that there are inexorable limits set to 
Philosophy's power of satisfying the human spirit, and 
acutely sensible of the discontent which thus must remain 
to her votaries when she has done all that she can to reward 
their faithful service. 

It is probable that Mr. Bradley's attitude in this matter 
would be found to commend itself to a larger number of 
persons than Mr. Bosanquet's ; but it must be allowed 
that there is a very large and perhaps an increasing 
proportion of thoughtful people to whom the prospect of 
a continuance of a personal life beyond the grave, which 
to a former generation it seemed the chief recommenda- 
tion of the Christian religion that it set in a clearer light 
than other creeds, does not possess its old attraction. 
Not only are they dissatisfied with the evidence offered 



254 DIVINE PERSONALITY 

in its behalf ; it is, if I may so put it, quite ' out of the 
picture ' which they have formed of the plan of the universe 
and of human existence. What charm it may be made 
to wear in fancy has for them as little influence upon their 
serious concerns as the glamour of a fairy-tale, which we 
may take pleasure in reading, yet about which it scarcely 
occurs to us even to ask ourselves whether we wish that 
it could be true, still less whether we could believe thiit 
it was so. This lack of a genuine interest in what appeared 
to the greatest minds of a time not far remote from our 
own a problem of the gravest and most universal import 
is sometimes expressed with a certain air of bravado which 
may make us doubt whether it is really quite so deeply 
seated as it would have itself be thought. 9 

Convention always counts for something in these matters^ 
In one age even daring spirits shrink from confessing, not 
only to others but to themselves, that an aspiration which 
to all around them means very much is to themselves 
indifferent ; and they will go to the furthest point that 
their consciences will allow in acknowledging its nobility 
and significance. In another age we find quite a contrary 
state of things, and men sensitive to the currents of popular 
opinion will even feel a sense of shame in admitting them- 
selves to be influenced by this same aspiration, when it 
has fallen out of fashion with those who are esteemed as 
the representatives of the most advanced and accurate 
thought of the day. One may be permitted to discount 
in both cases the influence of the prevalent drift of senti- 
ment. Probably in other days there was more indifference, 

9 I need not say that I am not thinking of Mr. Bosanquet, who 
always discusses grave subjects with the seriousness which is their 
due. But I admit that I have sometimes felt Prof. Parker's language 
to be suggestive of the suspicion which I have indicated in the 
text. 



THE DESTINY OF THE INDIVIDUAL 255 

in ours less indifference to the hope of Immortahty than 
one would judge from the literature of the respective periods. 
It is noteworthy indeed that, as I remarked in the intro- 
ductory Lecture to my previous course, the sad events 
of the late war have undoubtedly renewed and quickened 
in a remarkable degree in this, and probably in other 
belligerent countries, what had been to some extent, 
at any rate, a flagging interest in the problem of life after 
death. 

For my own part, I will frankly confess that, while I find 
it hard to convince myself that human nature has changed 
so greatly within the last century that the age-long 
yearnings for a life after death have suddenly died away 
to the extent that one is sometimes disposed to believe ; 
and while I admit the great difficulty of constructing a 
theodicy, a justification of the ways of God to man, which 
shall not include at least such a survival of death as shall 
suffer the individual to " see of the travail of his soul and 
be satisfied ; " ^^ yet the drift of opinion away from the old 
emphasis on personal immortality which was characteristic 
of so much of the theology and philosophy of the eigh- 
teenth century is reflected in my own sentiments. My 
imagination is not easily persuaded to reach forward into 
a world so different from this as must be any reserved 
for us after death ; it is rather repelled than attracted by 
the phraseology, so familiar to us in our religious literature, 
which expresses exultation in the expected catastrophe 
and overthrow of the present order of nature. I do not 
feel — I doubt if I have ever felt — what Tennyson " has 
strikingly called " the sacred passion of the second 
life," a passion which became perhaps the ruling passion 

" Isa. liii. II. 

" Tennyson, Lock shy Hall Sixty Years After. 



256 DIVINE PERSONALITY 

in the mind of the poet who so described it. I may thus 
perhaps be allowed to claim that, if I approach the sub- 
ject of the present Lecture with a certain prejudice in 
favour of a belief historically so closely associated as that 
in Immortality with the religious experience on the reality 
and importance of which I am insisting, that prejudice 
is balanced by another prejudice, which is at least equal 
to and in some ways greater than it, a prejudice against 
a belief which jars upon and distresses my imagination, 
and from the consideration of which my mind has an 
instinctive tendency to turn aside. 

In one of the lectures of my previous course I discussed 
the use of Myths in Philosophy, especially as illustrated 
by the writings of Plato ; and in the course of this dis- 
cussion was led to insist upon the error of expecting from 
Philosophy a forecast of the future. I will not now repeat 
what I then said on this subject, but will content myself 
with reminding you that prophecy of things to come, 
whether earthly or heavenly, is not the business of Philoso- 
phy, and that she is quite incompetent to supply it. The 
most that she can do towards throwing light upon the 
future is to describe that eternal nature or structure of 
Reality to which any events, past, present, or future, 
must conform themselves ; for the study of this eternal 
nature or structure is her proper business. Thus, as the 
concern of a Gifford Lecturer is with Natural Theology, 
which I have taken throughout to be a branch of Philosophy, 
the result of philosophical reflexion upon religious ex- 
perience, it is only with the doctrine of a future life so 
far as it is inferred from, a certain theory of the nature of 
structure of Reality that I shall here occupy myself. Of 
such evidence for it as is offered by the investigation of 
ghost stories or of alleged communication with the dead 



THE DESTINY OF THE INDIVIDUAL 257 

through spirituaHstic mediums and the Hke I shall only 
speak by the way, and for the purpose of distinguish- 
ing this evidence from the properly philosophical grounds 
upon which the doctrine may be recommended to our 
acceptance. 

The faith in Immortality which has long been a chief 
article of European religion derives historically from a 
double root ; from the Platonic philosophy and from the 
religious experience of the Jews during the period of their 
history which intervened between the overthrow of their 
political independence and the rise of Christianity. 

It is to be very particularly remarked that neither the 
Platonic doctrine nor that of Judaism is a mere develop- 
ment, still less a mere survival, of those more primitive 
beliefs of world-wide diffusion which form the topic of 
Sir James Frazer's Gifford Lectures on The Belief in 
Immortality. There is in both cases a notable break 
intervening between the prevalence of these older faiths 
and the higher creeds which were to take their place. The 
more ancient parts of the Old Testament bear witness to 
a belief in an underworld into which men passed after 
death and in which they were cut off from the life of their 
people and the worship of their people's God. " The grave 
cannot praise thee," says Hezekiah to his God, when he 
was recovered of what had seemed like to be his mortal 
sickness ; " death cannot celebrate thee, they that go 
down to the pit cannot hope for thy truth. The living, 
the living shall praise thee." ^2 "in death," exclaims 
the Psalmist, " there is no remembrance of thee ; in 
Sheol who shall give thee thanks ? " ^3 

Dr. Charles, in his learned Jowett Lectures on Eschatology, 

" Isa. xxxviii. 18, 19. 
13 Ps. vi. 5. 

17 



258 DIVINE PERSONALITY 

Hebrew, Jewish and Christian, has shown how in its earlier 
stages the higher rehgion of the Prophets was so far from 
developing their primitive doctrine of the underworld 
into one of a desirable immortality that by its deliberate 
discouragement, in the interests of the sole divinity of 
Jahveh, of the customs connected with the worship of 
departed ancestors, it rather tended to emphasize the 
loss in the grave of all such life, movement and knowledge 
as the older tradition had allowed to the shades of the 
departed, whom according to that tradition it was worth 
their descendants' while to propitiate and in emergencies 
to consult through the agency of witch or of diviner. 

According to the view of Dr. Charles,^ the primitive 
beliefs of Israel regarding the future life, being connected 
with Ancestor-worship, were from the first implicitly 
antagonistic to the religion which looked back to Moses 
as its founder, and in which Jahveh, the national God 
who dwelt in the midst of his people, was the sole object 
of worship. Hence this religion opposed itself to all 
preoccupation with the state of the dead in the underworld ; 
and the Sadducees of the Gospel, who said " that there 
was no resurrection "^5 and looked forward to no blessed 
future, were but maintaining a view which had at one 
time been the truly orthodox one in opposition to a 
heathenish dread or veneration of ancestral ghosts. But 
while thus destroying this older doctrine of an existence 
beyond the grave, the religion of Moses and the prophets 
" was," to quote Dr. Charles, *' steadily developing in 
the individual the consciousness of a new life and a new 
worth through immediate communion with God." " It 
is, " he goes on, '' from the consciousness of this new life " 

M Eschatology, pp. 52 foil. 
IS Mark xii. 18. 



THE DESTINY OF THE INDIVIDUAL 25d 

— not from the belief in a shadowy survival in the under- 
world — " that the doctrine of a blessed future — whether 
of the soul only immediately after death or of the soul 
and body through a resurrection at some later date — was 
developed in Israel. Thus this doctrine was a new creation, 
the offspring of faith in God on the part of Israel's saints." 
If we may accept this account of the history of the Jewish 
doctrine of a desirable existence after death, given by an 
eminent scholar who has devoted his life to the study of 
the subject, we have in that history a singularly close 
parallel to the history of the corresponding doctrine among 
the Greeks. Here too we find a primitive belief that 
after death men's conscious being is prolonged in a dim 
and shadowy underworld, where, as Achilles says in the 
Odyssey, ^^ it is less desirable to be a king than to be a 
bondservant upon earth ; where the departed dwell in 
"dumb forgetfulness " ^7 unless quickened into transient 
life by a draught of sacrificial blood. Here too this 
dreary notion of a future life was bound up with the 
propitiation of ancestors and (in the absence of any such 
religious opposition to practices of this nature as character- 
ized the teaching of the Jewish prophets) this association 
with customs deeply rooted in the life and tradition of 
every family kept a certain respect for the older belief 
alive after it had lost all hold upon the minds of the 
educated. Thus in his Nicomachean Ethics ^^ Aristotle 
is studious to avoid any direct attack upon it, while by no 
means concealing its lack of any importance for himself. 
On the other hand, when Socrates in Plato's Republic ^9 

i6 Odyss. xi. 489 ft". 

17 Gray, Elegy written in a Country Churchyard. 

18 Eth. Nic. i. II, iioi a 22 fl;- 

19 Rep. X. 608 D. 



260 DIVINE PERSONALITY 

says to Glaucon : " Have you not noted that our Soul is 
immortal and never perishes ? " and the clever, thoughtful 
young man of the world replies in undisguised astonish- 
ment : " By Jove, not I — can you go so far as that ? " 
it was something very different from an acquiescence, 
like that of Aristotle, in the language of a time-hallowed 
domestic ritual that has excited his surprise. 

Undoubtedly Glaucon was no stranger to this language, 
or to the allusions to the underworld in Homer and other 
poets, or even to the more cheerful, if not verj^ elevated 
or spiritual imaginations of an " eternal drunkenness " 20 
which his brother Adeimantus is made to recount in his 
presentation of the case for a selfish theory of Justice. 
Nor can we suppose that it is Plato's intention to represent 
his own brother as altogether ignorant of the existence of 
Orphic and Pythagorean speculations ' of a higher mood ' 
than these, to which the doctrines of Socrates and Plato 
themselves were unquestionably much indebted — specula- 
tions on the essential divinity of the soul, and on its 
adventures before and after its incarnation in particular 
bodies. But a serious faith in the possibility of an 
immortality of real happiness for the soul of every man 
that would order his life aright, not dependent on the 
offerings of posterity or conditional on initiation into 
some secret society of worshippers, this was new to him. 
This faith Aristotle, it is to be noted, altogether ignores, 
no doubt because he did not himself share it, and did not 
wish to attack his master Plato on a point in respect 
of which he probably held that he agreed with that 
master in what he took to be the root of the matter, 
namely the eternity of the Reason. But it was precisely 
this faith, thus ignored by Aristotle, that became one 
ao Rep. ii. 363 D. 



THE DESTINY OF THE INDIVIDUAL 261 

of the sources, the prophetic faith of Israel being the 
other, of the doctrine of ImmortaHty which has been so 
prominent in the theology and philosophy of Christendom. 
In Greece itself " it never became a part of the national 
creed " ^^ until it had been reinforced by the Christian 
proclamation of ' Jesus and the resurrection/ 

It will not be supposed that I am pretending to give 
here even a brief summary of the whole history of the 
doctrine of a life after death among the Israelites and the 
Greeks. I should not indeed be competent to such a 
task, even were it relevant to my present purpose. I am 
not unaware that there were influences to which I have 
made no reference at all, which counted for something 
and even for much in the development of opinion in 
those nations upon this subject. ^^ i have been content 
to indicate, what does appear to me to be the fact, that 
neither the Jewish hope of immortality which Christianity 
took up into itself (both Jesus himself and St. Paul ranging 
themselves with the Pharisees and against the Sadducees 
in this matter), nor the Platonic affirmation of the death- 
lessness of the human soul, were refined reinterpretations, 
still less mere survivals, of the beliefs associated with 
primitive animism all the world over. They represent 
a new departure, and they presuppose a breach with 
those earlier notions, a breach which took in the case of 
the Israelites the form of a religious reprobation, in that 
of the Greeks the form of a polite incredulity. And 
this new departure was in each case occasioned by 
reflexion on an experience, and I think we may even 
say in each case by reflection on a religious experience, 
although the experience of the Israelites more obviously 

21 Charles, Eschatology, p. 151. 

2» e.g. the Persian and the Egyptian. 



262 



DIVINE PERSONALITY 



possesses that character than that of the Greeks, which 
one would be at first no doubt disposed to describe 
rather as philosophical. It is possible, however, for 
both these designations to be applicable to the same 
experience. 

We have seen how the increasing sense of spiritual 
intimacy between the pious Israelite and his God gave 
rise to an increasing conviction that such intimacy could 
not be thought to end with bodily death ; and thus 
created a belief in immortality as the consequence of the 
individual soul's relation to the Eternal,23 who was now 
no more regarded as merely a national deity, bound up 
with the national life and inconceivable apart from it, 
but as One with whom the soul of the individual Israelite 
could enjoy a communion, mediated indeed by the national 
beliefs respecting his character and will, but independent 
of the national ceremonies from which the worshipper 
was excluded by exile from the holy city or by the inter- 
ference of foreign violence. 

In the same way the Platonic assurance of immortality 
rests upon the recognition of the Soul's prerogative as the 
only kind of being capable of apprehending Ideas or 
Forms which, in the systematic unity which belongs to 
them as exhibiting in its fulness the nature of the Good, 
constitute the ultimate reality of the Universe. These 
Ideas are indeed operative everywhere ; but in the Soul 
they are present in a peculiar sense, which entitles us to 
speak of that highest part thereof, which is cognizant 

23 It is to be observed that it is precisely upon this ground that 
Jesus, in his reply to the Sadducees (Mark xii. 26) bases his doctrine 
of a life after death, alleging Mosaic authority for it in the divine 
title which, by maldng God the God of Abraham, of Isaac, and 
of Jacob, proved that these saints must be thought of as living 
and not as dead. 



THE DESTINY OF THE INDIVIDUAL 263 

of them, as the Place of Ideas.24 Thus the Soul or, at 
least, this highest part of it participates in the eternity 
of the Ideas which are present to it and in it. We cannot, 
I think, but be struck with the resemblance, no doubt 
amid remarkable differences of expression, which this 
doctrine bears to the Jewish doctrine of Immortality as 
involved in the intimacy enjoyed by the Souls of the 
righteous with their Eternal Creator. Behind the latter 
lies what everyone who does not regard it as an illusion 
would admit to be a religious experience ; behind the 
former a spiritual activity in following the argument 
whithersoever it may lead, while resolutely setting one's 
face toward whatever we cannot doubt, when it is presented 
to us, to be better than what is contrasted with it. Such 
an activity cannot be denied to be ' experience,' and only 
in a very narrow interpretation of the word ' religious ' 
can that word fairly be regarded as inapplicable to it. 
The interpretation of the Platonic Ideas as the thoughts 
of God, which commended itself to Augustine,25 was so 
far at least justified that, when the Platonist speaks of 
what is eternal and immutable, he is certainly speaking 
of what can only be described in the language of those 
who inherit the religious tradition of Israel as belonging 
to the nature of their one supreme God. 

Against this striking resemblance of the two doctrines 
of Immortality, the combined influence of which upon 
the religion of modern Europe and America has been 
so great, we may set a notable difference between them ; 
and in respect of this difference the belief in Immortality 
which forms so important a part of the popular religion 
of the modern world agrees rather with the Jewish than 

*4 TOTTOQ dSuiv. See Ar,, de Anima, iii. 4, 429 a 28. 
25 Aug. de div. qucBst. d>^, xlvi. 



264 DIVINE PERSONALITY 

with the Greek tradition. For it is above all things a 
belief in the immortality of the whole individual ; whereas 
the Platonic doctrine was, or easily passed into being, 
a doctrine of the immortality, or rather the eternity, 
of the Reason, which transcends the distinction of one 
individual mind from another in its apprehension of an 
object which is common to all minds, since it belongs 
to the essential nature of Mind, wherever found to appre- 
hend it. 

This is, I think, upon the whole a true account of the 
distinction between the respective tendencies of the two 
traditions ; although on the one hand Plato himself was 
genuinely interested in the individual's hopes of future 
happiness, and on the other hand, St. Paul-^ seems some- 
times to have approximated in his treatment of the old 
Hebrew distinction of ' soul ' and ' spirit ' (irv^vjia) to 
the Greek distinction of ' soul ' and ' reason ' {vovg), 
and to have thought of Immortality as the prerogative 
of the ' Spirit,' regarding the soul as perishable like the 
body which it animates and which is of an essentially 
inferior nature to the " body which shall be," the glorious 
vehicle of the glorified ' spirit.' The relation borne by 
this body to the body which we commit to the earth is 
in that familiar passage so often heard at the burying of 
Christian people ^1 compared to the relation of the seed 
to the full-grown plant ; but the stress is laid by the apostle 
rather upon the unlikeness of these two than upon the 
identity which unites them as different stages of a single 
process of evolution. We must observe, however, that 
this speculation remains true to the Jewish type of doctrine 
in that it involves what St. Paul calls in Jewish fashion 

2^ See Charles, Eschatology, pp. 409 ff. 
27 I Cor. XV. 36 ff. 



THE DESTINY OF THE INDIVIDUAL 265 

a ' resurrection/ although he does not call the risen body 
the same with the body that was buried. The immortality 
to which he looks forward is the immortality of a complete 
human individual, and humanity was for him recogniz- 
able only in a spirit expressing itself through a bodily 
organism. The Christian Church has never in her teaching 
respecting a future life abandoned this position, which 
is indeed intimately connected with the central place 
which belongs to the Incarnation in her theological 
system. 

The doctrine of Immortality of whose historical affinities 
the above paragraphs may perhaps afford for our im- 
mediate purpose a sufficient indication is thus a doctrine 
of the kind which we saw it was consonant with the 
aim of a course of Gifford Lectures to consider. It takes 
as its point of departure the nature of Reality as revealed 
in the religious experience of a personal relation of the 
individual soul to that Perfect and Eternal Being of which 
it becomes aware in and through the recognition of its 
own incompleteness and finitude. 

If this experience can be adequately described as a 
revelation of this Supreme Being to and in the conscious- 
ness of the individual soul, or even, in view of the joy and 
delight excited in us by this revelation, as a love of God, 
which is, however, exclusively an amor intellectualis , 
and which admits of no reciprocation,*^ then indeed we 
may take upon our lips the famous words of Spinoza 
* Sentimus experimurque nos ceternos esse ' ; ^9 but we shall 

^8 See Spinoza, Eth., v. 19. Cp. Goethe, Dichtung und Wahrheif, 
xiv. It is worthy of observation that the controversy aroused 
in the Catholic Church by the iriystical movement called Quietism 
and its doctrine of the possibility of a disinterested love of God 
was contemporary with Spinoza. 

'9 Eth, V. 23. 



266 DIVINE PERSONALITY 

(with Spinoza) find no guarantee for the survival of bodily 
death by aught in us except the intellectus which is alone 
capable of this immortalizing communion with the Eternal. 
And to this the unique individuality which distinguishes 
each of us from all his fellows may seem to be indifferent. 
On the other hand, if we are conscious in our religious 
experience of a reciprocal personal intercourse, or (which 
I believe will be found in the end to come to the same thing) 
of a religious value in our unique individuality, expres- 
sible, and perhaps only expressible, in terms of the value 
which one human being has for another in the reciprocal 
personal intercourse of intimate friends,3o we shall not 
easily be content to suppose that only the universal 
values expressed in our personal lives, and not also the 
unique individuality in which they have found expres- 
sion, are secure in him who has known and loved us 
as individual persons. 

Nevertheless there are in the way of a belief of this 
kind in Immortality, suggested by reflexion upon the 

30 I give this alternative statement, in order not to limit the 
religious experience of which I speak to cases in which there is 
a vivid imagination of the presence or utterance of the Divine 
Being with whom we are conscious of having to do in our religion. 
Such cases are almost certainly a minority and even a small 
minority of those which I should consider genuine instances of 
religious communion with God. But, in an immeasurably greater 
number of cases there persists through all the var\'ing harmonies 
and discords of life, as the theme of the whole, never lost or aban- 
doned altogether, the conviction that all I am, have been, and 
shall be, nay — as Browning's Rabbi ben Ezra says — 

All I could never be. 
All men ignored in me. 
That I was worth to God. 

I do not think that we can interpret this conviction in terms other 
than those of a personal acquaintance with our soul on the part 
of God. 



THE DESTINY OF THE INDIVIDUAL 267 

religious experience of personal intercourse with the 
Eternal, several serious difficulties. The principal of 
these I propose briefly to point out, offering upon each a 
few observations which will make no pretence to constitute 
an adequate discussion, but may serve to indicate my 
own attitude towards it. 

By far the most obvious and, in my own judgment, 
the gravest of these difficulties is that suggested by the 
absence of any evidence of a generally convincing nature 
that a human soul can exist in independence of a human 
body. Anything like a full examination of this problem 
would indeed require a knowledge of the natural history 
both of Body and of Soul which I am very far from possess- 
ing. I can only, as I said, describe my own convictions, 
for what they are worth. 

I take it that it will be very generally admitted by those 
who have considered this question that the connexion 
of Soul with Body is not capable of being exhibited as 
a necessity of thought ; that the hypothesis that the 
former may exist apart from the latter is not from the 
first ruled out as unmeaning, however little ground 
there may be for entertaining it. On the other hand I 
see nothing in the conception either of Soul or of Body 
which rules out the possibility that, for reasons of which 
we are unaware, it is in fact impossible that a Soul should 
exist apart from a Body. 

This being so, we are left to draw what conclusions we 
may either from the nature of the connexion of Soul 
and Body in so far as we are able to observe the pheno- 
mena in which it is exhibited, or from facts or alleged 
facts tending to show that souls do actually exist in a 
disembodied state. 

To take the latter possible source of information first, 



268 DIVINE PERSONALITY 

I have already in the first Lecture of the present course 
disclaimed any particular competence to deal with the 
evidence brought forward by certain persons, who have 
engaged in what is called ' psychical research,' to support 
the belief in the existence of disembodied or discarnate 
Souls. I can only say that what I know of it on a very 
superficial acquaintance does not seem to me to carry 
conviction. The late Henry Sidgwick, a singularly 
cautious and judicious inquirer, who devoted much time 
and pains to these investigations, found himself at last 
convinced of the real occurrence of what is called ' tele- 
pathy ' between persons in the body, but unable to agree 
with his brilliant though far less cautious and judicious 
friend and fellow-student of these matters, Frederic 
Myers, in thinking that the evidence placed also beyond 
reasonable doubt the activity of souls which had survived 
the dissolution of their bodies. Were it otherwise, no 
doubt the confident assertion of some that souls do not 
survive the dissolution of their bodies would be set aside 
by a contrary instance ; and this would involve an 
addition to our knowledge of the Universe of the greatest 
interest at once scientific and practical. It would be 
absurd to deny this. 

At the same time, it would be, I venture to think, very 
far from proving the Immortality of the Soul, still less 
from establishing the religious doctrine which is usually 
described by that name. For evidence that a soul could 
survive its body would be far from constituting evidence 
that it would never perish. Nor, if appeal be made to 
revelations from the spirit world, is there any antecedent 
reason for supposing that statements on this or other 
subjects made by persons who have passed through death 
would necessarily be any more trustworthy than statements 



THE DESTINY OF THE INDIVIDUAL 269 

made by persons who have not. And as to the religious 
doctrine of Immortahty, it is before everything else a 
doctrine of values ; and the discovery that, as a matter 
of fact, some or all persons survived what we call death 
would not in itself establish such a doctrine any more 
than the discovery that some persons had recovered from 
a disease commonly supposed incurable, or had prolonged 
their earthly existence beyond the age of one hundred 
and fifty years. 

Turning back from the alleged evidence of the actual 
existence of souls in a disembodied state (or at least without 
material bodies such as we are familiar with in our ex- 
perience) to the nature of the connexion between Soul and 
Body, we find several competing theories put forward as 
to this connexion which you will not expect me now to 
examine in detail. Of them all, with perhaps one excep- 
tion, it may, I think, be said, that they neither afford 
a proof, nor even establish a probability of the separate 
existence of the soul or of its capacity to survive the 
dissolution of its body. On the other hand there are 
some among them which may be said to exclude even 
the possibility of these things. But these, as it appears 
to me, are, either altogether, or in those respects in which 
they rule out the possibiHty of a life beyond the grave, 
plainly unsatisfactory accounts of the facts which they 
profess to explain or describe. 

The one exception to the general failure of theories of 
the connexion of Soul and Body to afford a sufficient 
ground for the doctrine of a life beyond the grave is the 
ancient theory that the Body is the prison-house of the 
Soul, to which it is confined as a punishment for sins 
committed in a previous state of existence. While this 
theory is by no means extinct to-day, it is not Hkely to 



270 DIVINE PERSONALITY 

find many adherents among ourselves, except upon 
grounds of revelation, such as are excluded from our 
present purview, or of the recollection by Hving persons 
of prenatal experience ; and this latter I certainly know 
no satisfactory evidence to substantiate. 

It is true that not a few thinkers have regarded the 
relation of the Body to the Soul as the same in principle 
with that of an instrument to the user of it ; and this 
analogy would certainly seem to suggest, and has suggested 
to many, that one need no more expect the Soul to cease 
to exist when the Body is destroyed or worn out than one 
expects the life of a musician necessarily to perish or 
decay along with the organ on which he has been accus- 
tomed to play. But a closer consideration of the pecuUarity, 
on any showing, of the special relation of this instrument 
to its user will immensely lessen the force of the argument. 
For it is an instrument which only this individual soul 
can use in this way as its own body ; it is an instrument 
the appropriation of which by the soul is not voluntary ; 
nay, to all appearance, the soul itself in every instance has 
been developed within its body and has been at every 
stage conditioned by its structure and its resources. The 
intimacy of the relation between a particular body and 
a particular soul in fact so far surpasses that existing 
between any artificial instrument and the human being 
who uses it that there would seem nothing paradoxical 
in supposing the former relation to be one belonging to 
the very nature of the soul, out of which it could not 
exist. 

On the other hand certain views of the nature of the 
connexion between Soul and Body would seem to exclude 
the possibility that the soul should survive the dissolution 
of its body. Such would be that Pythagorean view of 



THE DESTINY OF THE INDIVIDUAL 271 

the relation of soul to body as comparable with that of 
a harmony to the lyre which Simmias in Plato's Phcedo v- 
submits to the criticism of Socrates during the last hours 
of the great teacher's earthly hfe. For, were this true, 
then 

As music and splendour 

Survive not the lamp and the lute,32 

When the lamp is shatter'd 

The light in the dust hes dead — 

When the cloud is scatter'd 

The rainbow's glory is shed. 

When the lute is broken, 

Sweet tones are remembered not : 

WTien the lips have spoken, 

Loved accents are soon forgot, 

so the soul could assuredly not survive the body. The 
most obvious objection to this view (though it is not the 
objection taken by Socrates in the Phcsdo, which depends 
upon the previous admission by Simmias of the truth 
of the doctrine of Reminiscence) is that it ignores the 
outstanding difference between Subject and Object, 
and thus the distinctive characteristic of the very thing 
about which we are arguing. 

The kindred theory of Epiphenomenahsm in modern 
times was no doubt primarily intended as an account of 
consciousness, while the doctrine that the Soul is a Har- 
mony was primarily intended rather as an account of 
life. But Epiphenomenahsm, though more awake than 
the older doctrine to the distinctive importance of 
consciousness, fails altogether, I think we may say, to 

31 PhcBdo, 85 E foil. 

32 Shelley, The Flight of Love. The verse preceding the lines 
quoted in the text will serve further to illustrate the conception 
here in question, although it is not the connexion of soul and body 
of which the poet is speaking. 



272 DIVINE PERSONALITY 

give an intelligible account of it or of any other 
activity which we may regard as belonging to the Soul. 
It leaves the Soul where Plato left the phenomenal 
world,33 suspended between being and not being. For 
apprehension, desire, consciousness are unquestionably 
there, provoking us to inquiry concerning them ; yet 
they have no place in the system of reality recognized 
by the Naturalism of the school which offers this 
theory for our acceptance. 

The name of Psycho-physical Parallelism may be used 
to cover several theories of the nature of the connexion 
between Body and Soul, the adoption of some of which 
would scarcely admit of belief in the soul's continued 
existence after the dissolution of its body. Among these 
would certainly be included such as do not really play 
fair between the physical and psychical series which 
are said to be parallel, but in fact ascribe to the psychical 
series a dependence upon the physical which is not reci- 
procated. But to all these theories may be reasonably 
opposed a consideration already advanced in a previous 
Lecture, where we were discussing the possibility of finding 
in the unity of the bodily organism the principle of the 
association, implied in the phrase ' dissociation of person- 
ality.' The unity of the Mind or Soul is of quite a different 
kind from that of the Body. And the contrast which 
strikes us between these two is emphasized when we 
consider either in relation to the wider world with which 
it is connected. The Body as a material system is included 
within a vaster material system. The other parts of this 
system are external to it and excluded by it. On the 
other hand the Mind or Soul connects itself with what 
we may figuratively call its environment not by excluding 
33 Rep, V, 479 d. 



THE DESTINY OF THE INDIVIDUAL 273 

it from but by including it within the unity of its own 
experience. 34 

I must not be supposed, in what I have just said, to 
have been aiming at anything hke an exhaustive discussion 
of the various theories of the nature of the connexion 
between Soul and Body, even from the point of view of 
their bearing upon the possibihty of the Soul's survival 
of the dissolution of its Body. 

On such a supposition I should rightly be considered 
to have fallen very far short of even a very unexacting 
standard. But my purpose has been the far more modest 
one of stating, with just sufficient reference to the different 
theories put forward to indicate to those familiar with 
them the lines upon which I should be prepared to deal 
with them, my own conclusion, for what it is worth, 
that, while from no general view known to me of the 
nature of the connexion of Soul and Body — except 
the ancient hypothesis mentioned at the outset that the 
Body is the prison of a fallen Soul — can the persistence 
of a Soul in being after the dissolution of its Body be 
inferred as a necessary or even a highly probable conse- 
quence, yet none which appears to me to be tenable 

34 Cp. Prof. Wildon Carr, Philosophy as Monadology. I speak 
in the text of ' mind or soul * for the following reason. It is the 
* mind ' as the subject of experience which is thus so remarkably 
distinguished from the body as including instead of excluding 
within its own unity that with which it is connected in a system. 
If we attribute to the ' soul ' vital activities below the level of 
consciousness, this may not seem to be true in the same way of 
the ' soul.' But, in the first place, the characteristic difference 
of organic growth from inorganic aggregation seems to lie in a 
process of assimilation which anticipates, as it were, the process 
of drawing within the unity of its own experience which is the 
characteristic of ' mind.' And in the second place, as was pointed 
out in my previous course of Lectures, we may be said to have in 
Life generally something which, as distinct from mere mechanism, we 
interpret on the analogy of Mind. (See God and Personality, p. 231.) 

18 



2T4 DIVINE PERSONALITY 

excludes altogether the possibility of such persistence. 
Nevertheless the close intimacy which in any case marks 
the association of the Body with the Soul and the lack 
of generally convincing evidence of the existence of souls 
apart from bodies inevitably arouse the suspicion that 
the connexion may in fact be necessary, although the 
grounds of this necessity have not been so far laid bare 
to our intelligence, and are perhaps never likely to be 
discovered thereby. 

Under these circumstances, of the two forms of the 
doctrine of a future life which are best known in Europe, 
that which speaks of the immortality of the soul " delivered 
from the burden of the flesh "35 and that which speaks of 
the resurrection of the body to be the organ of the Soul's 
' life everlasting '^different forms of the doctrine which 
are sometimes held in combination — it is the latter which 
seems best to suit with this close intimacy of the connexion 
of Soul and Body and this lack of evidence for the existence 
of the Soul except in that connexion. But the belief 
in the Resurrection of the Body is beset with difficulties 
of its own which it is sufficient here to indicate. I do not 
propose to discuss them. 

If this belief be entertained as relieving us from the 
difficulty of supposing the Soul capable of a disembodied 
existence, it is plain that this difficulty will still remain 
where an interval is held to elapse (as in the most usual 
representations of the Christian doctrine) between the 
termination of the soul's embodied existence on earth 
and its resumption of such an existence at some future 
date. 

The hypothesis, defended by St. Thomas Aquinas,36 

35 Collect in the Burial Service of the Church of England. 

36 Summa Theol. I. Ixxvi. i. ad 6™. 



THE DESTINY OF THE INDIVIDUAL 275 

of an abiding inclination towards its Body on the part 
of the separate Soul will hardly be found to satisfy many 
to whom this difhculty presents itself as serious. It 
has been attempted 37 to meet it in another way by the 
substitution for a future resurrection of the Body of the 
assumption by the Soul at death of a new spiritual Body. 
It is possible to find an anticipation of such a view in the 
teaching of St. Paul. But though St. Paul no doubt 
conceived the body with which the soul of a redeemed 
person was hereafter to be clothed as a ' glorious body ' 
very different from the present ' body of our humiliation/ 
and though, in the case of those who should be found 
alive at the return of Jesus Christ in glory to which he 
looked forward, he expected it to be assumed without a 
previous dissolution of the present body, and probably 
to absorb it into itself or even to result from some 
miraculous change passing over it ; yet he held that it 
always was somehow continuous with the present body.s* 
Where death had taken place before the second coming 
of Christ, the nature of this continuity could be illustrated 
from that which connects the seed with the plant which 
eventually springs from that seed. To us this whole 
speculation is apt to seem lacking in any basis of experienced 
fact. Nor can we easily even imagine any manner in 
which the structure of a multicellular organism, such 
as the human body, could be adapted to the purposes of 
an immortal life. It is true that our earthly bodies are 
not materially the same throughout our earthly existence 
and that they may perhaps not now contain a single 
particle which formed part of them some years ago. It 
was a difficulty raised by Cebes in the Phcedo of Plato 

37 E.g. by Dr. Charles in his Eschatology. 
3* See I Cor. xv. 



276 DIVINE PERSONALITY 

that the soul may during its earthly life wear out many 
bodies as a man may wear out many coats ; yet perhaps 
his last body may outlast his soul, as his last coat may 
outlast his body. 39 But even if we were to fancy each 
successive coat as made out of its predecessor by a gradual 
process of repair, the continuity would lack the peculiar 
character which belongs to that of organic growth and 
decay. And the first body which the soul is known to 
possess always within our experience comes into existence 
in one way, and in one way only ; and that a way which 
certainly affords no precedent for the wearing by the 
disembodied soul of a new body for itself not only materially 
but organically discontinuous with that first body. 

Thus neither for the immortality of the soul without a 
body, nor for the resurrection or new creation of a body for 
an immortal soul shall we find to our hand any arguments 
(not depending on the acceptance of a special revelation) 
which can be said to make these doctrines even plausible 
in face of the objections from the analogy of our common 
experience and from the lack of any generally cogent 
evidence in support of any alleged experience inconsistent 
with this. To these objections we may before leaving 
the subject add one or two others of a somewhat different 
kind. 

The first of these is the difficulty presented to the 
imagination by the thought of a future life which cannot 
plausibly be represented as of a piece with this. Questions 
may be raised like those urged by the Sadducees in the 
Gospel 40 or those mentioned by St. Paul in the chapter 
so often read among ourselves at the grave-side. I do 
not wish to say that such questions should not be raised. 

39 Plato, PhcBdo, 87 c ff. 

40 Cp. Bradley, Appearance and Reality, p. 509 n. 



THE DESTINY OF THE INDIVIDUAL 277 

The attempt to work out in imagination the details of 
a state of being to which we look forward may be a proof 
of the genuineness of our expectation. But failure in 
the attempt does not in the least show that we are likely 
never to find ourselves in the state in question. We 
can easily illustrate this for ourselves from the difficulty 
in time of peace of imagining the conditions of war, or 
from the difiiculty at any time of imagining the circum- 
stances of our deaths, which yet we do not for a moment 
doubt that we shall have to undergo. The imaginative 
difficulties which undoubtedly beset the behef in a future 
life are rightly called difficulties ; but they should not 
avail to outweigh any positive grounds which can be 
justly alleged for it. We need not fear to turn from them, 
as we read that Jesus turned from the puzzle about the 
woman with the seven husbands, to the reUgious experience 
of communion with a God who is *' not the God of the 
dead but of the living " — for it is precisely in this experience 
that there is contained the strongest, and perhaps the 
only strong, reason for the * hope of immortality.' 

Distinguishable from, though kindred to, the imagina- 
tive difficulties of the behef in a future life is the sense, 
if I may so express it, that the scale of our personal 
interests is adapted to the scale of our earthly life, and 
that, projected into eternity, they would be changed out 
of all knowledge. The contrary argument from the 
unwillingness to part with life which is notwithstanding 
common to most men was met by the late Professor 
Metchnikoff, the eminent discoverer of the phagocytes, 
by his theory that only the unhealthy conditions of our 
ordinary existence and especially the character of our 
ordinary diet prevent us from coming to an age when 
we should as contented centenarians he down, hke tired 



278 DIVINE PERSONALITY 

children, ready for the sleep that will know no waking. 
But such speculations do little to instruct us. Even as 
it is, we may probably say with truth that, in a very large 
number of cases, men are, when they come to die, weak 
and unconscious, or, if conscious, without any desire 
except that of rest. And, on the other hand, there seems 
no reason to suppose that a man whose days should be 
by a suitable regimen preserved for many years beyond 
what is now the normal limit of human life would, any 
more than old persons who, as we say, ' keep their faculties ' 
now do, necessarily lose while consciousness remained 
those wide-ranging interests, as of a ' spectator of all 
time and all existence, '4^ which seem so disproportionate 
to the apparent brevity of his sojourn in a world, the 
knowledge and enjoyment of a far larger portion whereof 
than he can ever become acquainted with would still 
be utterly insufficient for the satisfaction of his intellectual 
and spiritual appetite. For the faculty of apprehending 
the Eternal and the Absolute, on the presence whereof 
in our minds depends this appetite, is itself out of 
proportion with our apparent position in the system of 
nature, as beings filling a very little space and lasting 
a very little time. 

As I reminded you before, even Aristotle, with all his 
predilection for a naturahstic psychology, found himself 
driven to speak of this capacity as coming into our souls 
from without. 42 Yet, once introduced into the soul, it is 
not something which can be regarded as an accidental 
adjunct to it. The same Aristotle indeed has himself 
elsewhere said 43 that this faculty, the vovg, is each 

41 Plato, Rep., vi. 486 a. 

43 Aristotle, de Gen. An. ii. 3. 736 b 28. 

43 Eth. Nic, X. 7, 1 1 78 a 2. 



THE DESTINY OF THE INDIVIDUAL 279 

individual man's very self. And it is undeniable that 
that consciousness of self as a unity persisting through the 
vicissitude of our sensations, perceptions, and emotions, 
by which with good reason we suppose ourselves to be 
differentiated from the lower animals, this very conscious- 
ness is intimately bound up with and involves that 
consciousness of Reality as a unity, within which we 
distinguish ourselves from the persons and things over 
against us, which is implicit in all use of reason and 
only becomes explicit in Philosophy. 

There have, however, been throughout the history of 
philosophy thinkers — Aristotle himself, Averroes, Spinoza, 
will represent them in the ancient, medieval and modern 
periods of European civilization respectively — who have 
recognized this disproportion with our earthly destiny 
of that activity in our minds whereby we apprehend the 
Eternal and the Absolute, and have based upon it a theory 
of the immortality or rather eternity of this activity apart 
from those elements in our psychical nature which we should 
call more distinctively personal. These last may indeed 
seem to exhibit no such disproportion with the span of 
life which a man may reasonably look to accomplish 
in this world. And, although (it may be said) no doubt 
our sense of grief in parting from the affections and asso- 
ciations which are our most precious possessions in our 
earthly pilgrimage testifies to some dissatisfaction, it 
must be remembered that the quality thus imparted to 
our experience has itself a certain value of its own, which 
would vanish if the passing hence were really only a pass- 
ing " from this room into the next." 44 Without the 
poignancy of regret for irretrievable loss, without the 
sense of the fewness and shortness of our days, life would 
44 See Tenn3^son, The May Queen. Cp. Sir O. Lodge, Christopher, p- 51 • 



280 DIVINE PERSONALITY 

(we may be disposed to feel) be emptied of its peculiar 
pathos, and death of much of its solemnity. 

Such reflexions do, as it seems to me, tell against the 
easy optimism of a certain kind of spiritualistic doctrines 
which proclaim that ' there is no death,' for our judg- 
ments of value here range themselves along with the 
presumptions drawn from the silence of Nature against 
beliefs that are at once incongruous with earthly experience 
and discordant with the deeper harmonies of life. But the 
religious experience which is, at least to my thinking, 
the one strong ground for looking forward to a life beyond 
the grave, does not, as I understand it, suggest that * there 
is no death,' but rather that ' death is swallowed up 
in victory.' 45 Acquaintance with a God who " has 
known our soul in adversity "46 is acquaintance with a 
God in whom we can trust that nothing of such importance 
for the deepening and purifying of personal character 
as the lessons of the valley of the shadow of death will 
be lost in the life which is eternal because it is lived in 
him. 

If we turn from philosophers such as those I recently 
mentioned to others who among thinkers of the highest 
rank stand out as exhibiting a genuine concern for personal 
immortality, to Plato or to Kant, we shall perhaps at 
first be disposed to think it a circumstance difficult to 
reconcile with the main contention of this Lecture that 
to neither of them does it seem easy to ascribe a doctrine 
of personal intercourse between man and God. It is 
not clear that the God of Plato was what we should call 
a ' personal ' God ; or perhaps it would be a more correct 
way of speaking to say that, so far as Plato believed in 

45 See I Cor, xv. 54. 

46 Ps. xxxi. 7. 



THE DESTINY OF THE INDIVIDUAL 281 

a * personal ' God at all, that God was on the one hand 
not the * Supreme Being,' and on the other hand was 
rather considered as the wise and good Spirit whose 
activity could be inferred from the ordered motions of the 
system of nature than as the object of the individual's 
devotion and worship. And, as to Kant, I have already 
had occasion to refer to the suspicion and even hostility 
with which he looked upon all pretence to any kind of 
personal intimacy with that God in whom he was yet 
convinced that the seemingly discordant worlds of sense 
and of duty find their reconciliation and their unity. 

We may here note that both Plato and Kant, however 
they would have dealt with the problem of Divine Per- 
sonality and whatever their attitude to what religious 
writers have called * the practice of the presence of God,' 
were distinguished by an estimate of the dignity of the 
personal moral life and of its place in the system of Reality 
quite other than we find in Aristotle or in Spinoza ; and 
that it is a consequence of this estimate that to them it 
seemed a matter of real concern whether the life of the 
individual person reached its term at death, the occur- 
rence of which may depend on conditions quite irrelevant 
to the course of the moral development of the person who 
dies. 

We may also profitably observe that with both Plato 
and Kant, though for different reasons, it was just in re- 
spect of the religious interpretation of the personal moral 
hfe that their theories of the principles whereon that life 
is based may justly be accused of a certain incompleteness. 

In the case of Plato, the task of working out such an 
interpretation, thoroughly congenial though it would have 
been to the temper of his mind and the trend of his thought, 
was hampered by the deficiencies of the religious tradition 



282 DIVINE PERSONALITY 

which he inherited. On the one side the only form 
of that tradition which might have been suggestive of 
Divine Personahty was on moral grounds unacceptable 
to him, while that which was free from morally degrading 
associations was connected with the veneration of the 
heavenly bodies and of the order of the Universe, and 
so tended to remove the Divine to a distance from the 
personal life of human beings. It is, however, significant 
that, when we look to the later development of this thought 
among his Christian followers, we find the world of the 
Ideas, the eternal Natures which constitute the ultimate 
reality of the Universe, conceived as the content of the 
Logos or expression of the supreme Goodness, and this 
Logos as personal and indeed as no other than that very 
Person through whose intercourse with God as his Father ' 
the Christian Church had learned to regard personal rela- 
tions as intrinsic to the Divine Life. 

To some extent it is probably true that Kant was also I 
held back from committing himself unreservedly to a 
religious interpretation of that reverence for the Moral 
Law of which he so often spoke by the inadequacy of 
the religious tradition with which he was familiar to the 
demands of the moral consciousness. No doubt the 
inadequacy was far less glaring in his case than in that of 
Plato. The very fact that he could put forward, in his 
work on Religion within the hounds of mere Reason, a 
purely ethical interpretation of the chief doctrines of the 
established faith of his country is eloquent testimony 
to this. But his anxious avoidance of any language which 
would make moral obligation dependent upon any theolo- 
gical sanction might well have found some justification 
in the view, with which he cannot have been unfamiliar, 
of the positive ordinances of the Old Testament as divine 



t 



THE DESTINY OF THE INDIVIDUAL 288 

commands, and even more in the representation, prevalent 
in some quarters, of the divine decrees of predestination 
and reprobation as arbitrary, and of the moral characters 
of men as irrelevant to the question of their standing in 
God's sight. And he may very likely have been 
influenced still more by aversion to the sentimental 
tendencies of some forms of contemporary Pietism in 
his shrinking from any notion of an emotional relation 
to God, such as might seem to be inseparable from 
the claim to experience a genuine personal intercourse 
with him. 

But to this inadequacy of the religious tradition there 
was added in the case of Kant a temperament which 
unfitted him, not only for appreciation of the possibility 
of a personal relation between the devout worshipper 
and his God, but for those most intimate forms of human 
companionship from which the lovers of God have in 
all ages borrowed the language in which their piety can 
best find expression. Herein he presents, of course, a 
strong contrast to Plato, who holds love, the same love 
which in our affection for our friends and comrades seeks 
a personal object, to be the very principle whereon de- 
pends the philosophic quest of the Supreme Reality. 

We need not then be overmuch deterred by the absence 
from the pages of Plato and of Kant of an express recogni- 
tion of a personal intercourse in Religion between the 
worshipper and his God from seeing in their concern for 
personal Immortality a confirmation of the view which 
we had seemed to be approaching, that the experience of 
such a personal intercourse is the only trustworthy ground 
of a belief in a blessed life after death. For both philo- 
sophers emphasize in their different ways the irrelevance 
of death, if considered as the close of the development 



284 DIVINE PERSONALITY 

of the moral character of persons conversant — and not 
merely in what we may call an impersonal fashion, but 
so as that their whole personality is involved — with the 
Supreme Goodness. 

The conclusion of our inquiry then into the bearing of 
a doctrine of Personality in God upon the problem of the 
destiny of the individual human person is that this doctrine, 
understood as we have understood it, as the theological 
expression of an experience of personal intercourse between 
the worshipper and the Object of his worship, affords 
the only truly positive ground of which a Gifford Lecturer 
can take cognizance for a belief in future blessedness and 
immortality, such as can form an article in a religious 
creed. It does not, as we have seen, enable us to meet 
directly the insistent doubts suggested by our experience 
of the constant association of personal spirit with a body 
forming part of the system studied by the natural sciences. 
Such difficulties might be, at least negatively, met by 
convincing evidence of the kind alleged by some votaries 
of what is called * psychical research.' But this evidence, 
so far as it went, would remove the subject from the 
context of religious faith. 

If, however, the supreme and central fact of the universe 
is a personal Love, it is intelligible that the apprehension 
of this fact and of its implications for created persons, 
should be inaccessible to those cognitive activities which 
do not involve a personal orientation such as is expressed 
by the word ' faith.' 

We have to note, moreover, that, unless religious exper- 
ience (and that not only in the form which expresses 
itself most naturally in the doctrine of Personality in God) 
is altogether an illusion, it cannot be explained on the 
principle of a pure Naturahsm. Nor is it only rehgious 



THE DESTINY OF THE INDIVIDUAL 285 

experience of which this may be said. Science itself 
cannot be materiahstically explained. The scientific 
man who professes a materialistic view of the world 
not only, like Hume,47 forgets his paradoxical views 

, when he turns aside from his speculations to amuse 

. himself with a game of backgammon or divert himself 
in the society of his friends, but even in carrying on his 

' scientific inquiries he forgets them ; for, did he not forget 
them, they would paralyse him. The man who takes 
Religion into account is better able than the materialist 

I to be true to all sides of human experience. And 

[ out of the experience of Religion springs the hope of 

! Immortality. 

It is no doubt true that this hope must fade away where 

I the scientific view of the world holds exclusive dominion 
over men's thoughts. And conversely, where this hope 
prevails, it must unsettle that exclusive domination. 
Nor is it an ignoble loyalty which fears to encourage 
disaffection to a conception so majestic and comprehen- 

j sive and up to a certain point so satisfying to mind and 
heart as this same scientific view of the world. There 

I is a real danger lest in dwelling upon our personal hope 

I our whole outlook should become trivial and, so to say, 
parochial. And that is why, as it seems to me, the only 
form of the hope which it is profitable to indulge is that 
which is directed, not upon our own eternal hfe, but 
upon God's ; and only upon our own as involved in his. 
We shall not give the rein to our imagination, which is 

\ here incompetent. What in us and in our lives has in 
it the capacity to persist we cannot say ; much that 

f we may be disposed to regard as having it may in truth 
be as little fit to endure for ever as many childish tastes 
47 Hume, Treatise, I. iv. § 7 (ed. Selb^'-Bigge, p, 269). 



286 DIVINE PERSONALITY 

and desires to be prolonged into mature life. " Beloved, 
now are we the sons of God, and it doth not yet appear 
what we shall be/'i^ This is the testimony of religious 
experience. But if there is Personahty in God, it cannot 
easily be thought that Personality in the sons of God is 
the evanescent thing that to the naturalistic view of the 
world it must seem to be. " We shall be like him, for 
we shall see him as he is." 49 *' He is not the God of the 
dead, but of the living, for all live unto him." 5° 

There can be no doubt that, in so far as such considera- 
tions weigh with us, we shall be compelled to sit more 
loosely than perhaps we have been wont to do to what 
may conveniently be called the naturalistic view of the 
world ; and that despite its potent sway over our every- 
day imagination, and despite the danger, ever to be carefully 
guarded against, of making our liberty from its restraints 
a cloke for extravagant and fantastic license of speculation 
unworthy of our civilization. 

To counteract this danger we shall do well to learn a 
lesson from Kant's treatment of the three great topics 
of the metaphysical theology upon which he directed his 
destructive criticism — God, Freedom, and Immortality 
— as Postulates of Morality. If there has been any sub- 
stance in the contention of the Lectures which I am now 
concluding, we are at liberty to accept far more simply 
and less grudgingly than did Kant the testimony of 
religious experience. But we must keep ourselves from 
rashly assuming that convictions we have reached by way 
of reflexion upon the presuppositions of that experience 
can be verified apart from it. This is not to consent to 
such a divorce of Theology from Metaphysic as was 
recommended by Albrecht Ritschl, though it may serve 
4* I John iii. 2. 49 Ibid. 5« Mark xii. 27. 



THE DESTINY OF THE INDIVIDUAL 287 

to make his motive in recommending it intelligible to us. 
It is only to acknowledge that religious experience has, 
like other kinds of experience, its own sphere and its 
own laws. What at first appear to us as limitations 
imposed by these are seen on further consideration to 
be involved in what gives the experience its peculiar 
value. A religious conviction can no more be attained 
without faith than a moral conviction without respect 
for duty or an aesthetic conviction without a sense of 
beauty in colour or sound or form ; nor in any of these 
cases could we seriously desire it to be otherwise attain- 
able. But in the religious experience we may enjoy 
acquaintance with God, consciousness of the freedom 
involved in this acquaintance, assurance of a life with and 
in him which lifts us above the changes and chances 
of mortality. We have every right to employ our minds 
in asking what bearing this acquaintance, this conscious- 
ness, this assurance have upon our whole view of the world ; 
but we shall scrutinize very closely any inferences from 
them which seem to have lost sight altogether of the 
specific nature of the premisses from which it started. 
And in so scrutinizing them we shall after all be doing no 
more than observing a time-honoured rule of the common 
logic which has come down to us from Aristotle, and 
which warns us against neglecting the peculiar nature 
of the principles available in each grand department of 
knowledge, and against such migration from one of these 
departments to another as only a neglect of the peculiarity 
of the principles of each could have suggested. 

With this remark I bring these Lectures to a close. 
No one can be more conscious than I of their inadequacy 
to the height of the great argument which I have attempted 
to handle in them. No one can be more fearful than I 



288 DIVINE PERSONALITY 

of the possible discouragement which disappointment 
at this inadequacy may bring to some who may have 
looked for help to a discussion of these matters from a 
chair which has in the past been occupied by so many 
eminent men. But the poor in intellectual and spiritual 
as well as in material wealth may take shelter under the 
divine apology for her who cast into the treasury all that 
she had. 



INDEX 



-Absolute Idealism, 20, 193, 196, 

227 #. 
Ads of the Apostles, 27, 238 
Analogy, iSi ff., 203 
Anselm, 179 

Anthropomorphism, 82/., 91, 99 
A priori, 174, 179, 187 
Aristotle. 43, 47, 54, ^6ff., 61, 76, 

134, 145 /-. 149, 154. 178, 191. 

199 #., 206, 209, 221, 234, 251, 

259/., 263 w., 278/., 281, 287 
Atheism, 84/., 114/., 117, i6g ff. 
Augustine, 116, 165 «., 263 
Augustus, 141 
Austin, 128 
Autonomy, iigff., 142 
Averroes, 279 

Bacon, 58, 69, 176, 201, 20 j n. 

BaiJIie, Prof. J. B., 235 n. 

Behmen, Jacob, 43, 98 

Bergson, M. Henri, 41 n. 

Berkeley, 182, 202 

Blake, 91/., g^ff,, 109 #., 114, 168, 
170, 173 

Bluntschli, 155 

Boethius, 23/. 

Bosanquet, Mr. B., 19, 22S ff., 

244/.. 247, 250 j^. 
Bradley, Mr. F. H., 234 j^r., 252/., 

276 «. 
Brooke, Rupert, 82 n. 
Browning, E. B., 107 
Browning, R., 222/., 266 n. 
Buddhism, 173 
Bunyan, 116 
Burke, 151/. 
Butler, 119, 156, 246 

Carr. Prof. J. Wildon, 225, 273 «. 
Charles, Dr. R. H., 257 jf., 261, 275 n. 

19 



Chesterton, Mr. G. K, 99/., 102 
Christianity, 18/., 56, 89, lozff,, 

115. 139. 146/.. i62j5r., 172^ 
252/., 264/., 274, 282 

Cicero, 95 

Coleridge, 35, 93, 106/. 
Comte, 42 «., 170, 172 
Conscience, 37 
Consciousness, Z'^ff- 
Cromwell, 161 

Croce, Signor B., 42 w., 46, 88, 
gon.. 102 ff., 108 

Dante, 116, 141 

Democracy, 135, 142 

Descartes, 178/., 182, 187/., 226 «. 

Dickens, 24, 26 

Dreams, 33j5^., 181 

Ecclesiastes. 80 f. 
Ecclesiasticus, 139 
Elliott, Ebenezer, 240 
Epictetus, 58 
Epiphenomenalism, 271 
Eucken, Prof. R., 109 
Exodus, 44 

Faith, 177, 187, 2S4 
Fichte, J. G., 53 n. 
Fichte, J. H., 237 n. 
Filmer, 140 
Frazer, Sir J., 257 
Frederick the Great, 128 
Freedom, 205/. 

Freud, Dr. S., 35 n., 36/., 39. 45 
Frommel, M. Gustave, i24«., 131 «., 
132 «- 

Gahleo, 93 

Gierke, 152 

Gifford, Lord, 191, 248 

289 



290 



DIVINE PERSONALITY 



Goethe, 128, 265 k. 

Gray, 259 

Green, 124 n., 131, 197* 244, 247 

Hamilton, Sir W., 74 

Hebrews, Epistle to the, 118, 243 

Hegel, 38/., 75, 160 

Herrmann, Prof. W., 103 

History, 89 n. 

Homer, 95, 259/. 

Hiigel, Baron F. von, 72/. 

Hume, 236, 285 

Ideas, 262/., 282 

Identity of Indiscernibles, I99» 201 

Immanence, 87/., 105/.. 126, 132, 

157 
Immediacy, i74#- 
Immortality, 88, 247 j^T. 
Incarnation, 265 
Inference, 175 J^. 
Intellect, 61 
Intuition, 177 #. 
Isaiah, 42, 83, 255, 257 

James, Wilham, 41, 94, 151, i9i> 

219 «., 225 n. 
Jesus Christ, 23, 41/., 50. 98, 

I02j5r., 162, 238, 261/., 275, 

277, 282 
John, Epistle of, 43, 118 «., 286 
John, Gospel of, 159, 238 
John of the Cross, St., 116 
Joseph. Mr. H. W. B., 185 «. 
Judaism, 139/., 172/., 257 #. 

Kant, 50/., 54, 58, 75, 113, "9, 
121 #., 141/-. 173, 179. 246, 
280 j^r., 286 

Keats, 93, 95» 109, 250 

Kingdom of Ends, 126/. 

Kings, 158 n. 

Kingship, 136, 143, 160 

KipHng, Mr. Rudyard, 184, 230 



Laplace, 69 
Leibnitz, 127 «., 
• Lewis Carroll,' 
Life, 70 
Livy, 158 «. 



199, 201 
80 



Locke, 100, 140 
Lodge, Sir O., 279 «• 
Logos, 282 
Lotze, 146, 233 «. 
Luke, Gospel of, 49, 220 
Luther, 116 

M'Taggart, Dr. J. E., 84/., 237 n. 

Maeterlinck, M. Maurice, 100/. 

Maitland, 152 

Malan, Cesar (fils), 124 «., 132 «• 

Manicheanism, 95, 165 

Mark, Gospel of, 238, 258, 262 n., 

286 
Martineau, 123/., 129, 175 
Matthew, Gospel of, 49, 50, 53. io3 

Metchnikoff, 277 

Mill, J. S., 134 «• 

Milton, 9sf., loi, 118, 241 

Morris, William, 96 

Moses, 139, 258 

Muirhead, Prof. J. H., 192 k. 

Mukherjea, Mr. K. C, 41 ». 

Miiller, Julius, 132 «. 

Multiple Personalit5^ 22, 213 #.. 
223/. 

Mysticism, 162, 173, 187 #. 

Myers, F. W. H., 268 

Myths, 256 

Napoleon, 69 

Naturalism, 20, 76, I93» 196 # 

Newman, 175 

Newton, 93 

Nibelungenlied, 96 

Olympian Religion, 165 
Ontological Argument, 179 
' Ossian,' 96 
Ovid, 95 



Pantheism, 84/., 100/., 113 
Parker, Prof. D. H., ii5#-» 246. 

254 «• 
Pascal, 74, 83«., 116, 189 «• 
Paul, St., 49. 114. "6, 161/., 220/., 

261, 264, 275/., 280 
Personal Idealism, 211 #., 227. 

236/. 
Peter, St., 114 



INDEX 



391 



Physiology, 21, 196 

Pietism, 283 

Plato, 36 n., 41 n., 46, 54, 61, 70, 

76, 80, 83, 95, 138, 149, 155/-. 

162. 186, 208, 221, 237, 256/., 

259#. 271/., 275/., 278, 2S0 ff. 
Plotinus, 162 

Polytheism, 95 ff., 113, 164/. 
Pragmatism, 5Sjf.. 211/., 227 
Prince, Dr. Morton, 35, 214^., 

226 H. 
Pringle-Pattison, Prof. A. S., 124 n., 

237 n., 244 n.. 250 
Psalms, the, 75, 100, 257, 280 
' Psychical Research,' 23, 268, 284 
Psychology, 22, 27^., 39, 86 n., 

185, 188, 196 
Psychophysical Parallelism, 272 
Pythagoras, Pythagoreanism, 58, 

260, 270/. 

Quietism, 265 n. 

Raphael, 61 

Rashdall, Dr. H., 17^ ff-, 213 »., 

233 «. 
Rationalism, 38/- 
Reich, 127 
Reid, 236 

Resurrection, 265, 2.7/^ ff. 
Reverence, 12^ f., 169 
Ritschl, Albrecht, 103, 286 
Rousseau, 130/. 
Royce, 242 
Russell, Mr. Bertrand, 85 

Samuel, 106, 158 n. 

Sanday, Dr. W., 41 

Schleiermacher, 129 

Schopenhauer, 172/. 

Scipio, 158 

Shakespeare, 35, 40, 48/., 169, 188, 

206 
Shelley, 93, 271 
Sidgwick, Henry, 268 
Socrates, 58, 70, 259/., 271 



Solipsism, 181 ff. 

Sorley, Prof. W. R.. 156/. 

Space, 75, 185, 187/. 

Spencer, Herbert, 81/., 155 1 

Spinoza, 100, 191, 204 j^., 265/., 

279, 281 
' Stirner, Max,' 135 
Stout. Prof. G. F., 233 w. 
Swift. 78 
Swinburne, 99/., 168. 170 

Tartini, 35 

Telepathy, 268 

Tennyson, 38, 77/., 180, 217, 255, 

279 
TertuUian, 68 
Theocracy, 143 
Theonomy, 132/., 137, 142 
Theresa, St., 55 
Thomas Aquinas, 94/., 274/. 
Thompson, Francis, 62 Jf". 
Thomson, James, 79 
Time, 75 
Transcendence, 87/., 102, 105, 109^ 

126, 132, 157 
Trinity, 139, 146/., 163 j^. 
Truth, 58 #. 
Turner, 90 
Tussaud, Mme., 183 

Unconscious, the, 29;^^". 
Unitarianism, 93 
Upanishads, 173 

Value. Judgments of, 38 

Wagner, 96 

Ward, Wilfrid, 236 «. 

Wells, Mr. H. G.. 83, 143 

Wesley, 116 

William II, German Emperor, 15S 

Wilson, J. Cook, 124 n. 

Wordsworth, 78/., 90, 93, 95 

Xenophanes, 82 



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